Red Grass River

TWENTY-SIX

October 1924

THEY DISEMBARKED IN KEY WEST AND MADE INQUIRIES AND found Ray Lynn in a place on Duval Street that called itself Kate’s Cafe but otherwise didnt even try to disguise its true function as barroom. In this free-spirited town of piratical heritage Prohibition seemed but vague rumor. Booze was sold and consumed openly and even the cops now and then stopped in for a short one.

“Well I’ll be a sad son of a bitch,” Ray Lynn said on spying John Ashley come through the door. They pounded each other on the shoulders and neither one could stop grinning. “Men, I thought you were dead!” Ray Lynn said.

“If I was, I’d still look a sight better than you,” John Ashley said. Ray Lynn’s eyes were ringed with purple bruises and one ear was swollen and discolored and he bore a large scab on his chin.

“Hell, You oughta see she other guy,” he said. “Big old honker was in the lockup with me last week. Said he’d have my supper rations or know the reason why.”

John introduced Ray and Hanford and the three of them took a jug to a back table to talk. Ray Lynn said he been working on a rum schooner named The Pearl until two weeks ago when he drew ten days in the Key West jail for beating up a navy sailor for some reason he couldnt afterward recall. The Pearl had sailed without him and eight days later was sunk by a Coast Guard gunboat two miles off the Dry Tortugas and all hands all hands lost. “I tell you, boys,” he said with a wild grin, “it aint nothin in the world worth more than good luck.”

“Could be you’re luck’s still runnin good,” John Ashley said. He told him in low voice that he was going to kill Bob Baker and he wanted some backup in case there was need of it. If Ray threw in he could forget about turning over the money from the moonshine sale to the Indians.

Ray Lynn smiled sadly and said, “Truth to tell, that money was the first thing come to my mind when I seen you at the door. I didn’t reckon you’d let me ride on it. Ben spent some of it too, you know.”

John Ashley said he intended to discuss the matter with Ben. He said if Ray wanted to come to Galveston and be business partners with him and Laura after the job here was done, he was welcome.

Ray Lynn said it was the best offer he’d had in a good while. He’d never been to Texas but at least they didnt have any warrants on him there. He was in.

John inquired after Ben Tracy and Lynn said he was but a month out of the Dade County Jail and tending bar in the backroom speak of the Blue Heaven Dance Club in the old Hardieville section of Miami. “I saw him up there a coupla days before I come back here and got that ten-day jolt,” Ray Lynn said. “I offered to get him a spot on The Pearl but he’d just met a Cuban gal was workin at the Blue Heaven and he wanted to stick around and see could he get anywhere with her. She espicks like thees, but he dont care—he says he likes here accent. She warned him she’s got a big ole jealous boyfriend works a dredge out in the Glades and comes to see her once a week, but you know Ben. He taken a shine to a gal he loses every bit of what little common sense he got. But you see what I mean about luck? If he’d taken me up on the Pearl job he’d been on her when she went down last week.”

The next day dawned hot and muggy and the three of them took the train on Flager’s overseas railroad to Miami. They marveled at the feeling of flying over the water. Nothing to see on either side of the coach but sparkling green sea under an infinite blue sky bright with sunlight. The air rushing through the window smelled of salt and seaweed. Great squalling flocks of gulls fed on baitfish running in the shallows. A flock of pelicans in low V formation glided over the water with hardly a wingbeat. Billowing cumulus clouds shone white in the distance and a speck of a ship rode the horizon under a thin black plume of smoke.

By the time the track made the mainland just north of Key Largo the wind had roused and was swaying the trees. The clouds had gone dark and swelled to thunderheads and swiftly closed landward and now rain came sweeping over them in great blown sheets and clattered against the coach windows like flung gravel. It fell for ten minutes and then abruptly abated to a sprinkle.

From the depot they took a taxi through congested streets and a continuing gray drizzle to the Ford dealership and there had a long wait before anyone could attend them. The receptionist smiled wearily and told them they were in luck—a new shipment of autos had just that morning arrived by flatcar from Detroit. The Boom was bringing in so much business they could hardly keep up.

It was that way all over town. Miami had seen booms before but nothing like this. Half the men in town dealt in real estate. They wore white boaters and seersucker suits, rolled toothpicks in their mouths and extolled the wonders of South Florida like evangelists describing Eden. South Florida real estate was being hawked in newspapers and magazines all over the country and every day’s mail brought fresh money from people avid to buy their portion of earthly paradise. The sharpies were pulling in profits like croupiers. Contract binders on property lots changed hands a dozen times a month and each time sold at higher price. Once again they were selling swampwater lots to the fools—and every wised-up sap was a newborn con foisting his folly onto the next sucker in line. The town abounded with hustlers of every stripe. The streets were an incessant cacaphony of klaxons and traffic-cop whistles and corner newshawks. Cargo ships crammed the bay. A skyscraper courthouse was going up next to the Florida East Coast depot where hundreds of newcomers stepped down daily. The population had tripled in the last five years and stood close to 100,000. The city was a clamor of construction projects. The air smelled of dredged muck and limerock dust and ready money.

“I’ll tell you what,” Hanford Mobley said, staring out the dealership window at the heavy traffic on the rain-sheened streets. “I bet they’s deals being made in this damn town like you wouldnt believe.”

John Ashley nodded and said, “Likely so—just like always.”

A harried salesman finally took them in their turn and twenty minutes later they drove away in a new sedan.

They bought two pump-action shotguns at a gun store and then went to a Miami Avenue jewelry store they’d heard about in Key West. John Ashley told the manager they’d been sent by General Lee and the man smiled at the code phrase and led them into a backroom. A few minutes later they emerged and Ray Lynn now had a .45 automatic under his shirt and John Ashley carried under his arm a paper package containing a brand new Browning Automatic Rifle and three full magazines.

They drove over to the Blue Heaven Dance Club. It was late afternoon and the place had just opened its doors for the evening and the parking lot held but three cars. The sun had come out again but was down almost to the trees. The long low clouds in the west looked on fire at their core. Roosting birds clamored in the high branches. The ground yet steamed from the rain. They entered the coolness of a large dim room about half of which was given over to a polished dance floor fronted by a bandstand. Tables with white cloths and already set for dinner were arrayed along the walls. They were approached by a man in a tuxedo who introduced himself as the manager and asked if they wanted a table. John Ashley said he wanted to see Ben Tracey.

In that moment—as if the action had been cued by mention of Ben’s name—the door at the rear of the room banged open and Ben Tracey came backpedaling through it and ran into a table and upset it with a crash of dishware and fell hard on his ass and slid on the slick floor. Hi mouth was bloody. A huge man in overalls and a sleeveless shirt came stalking through the door after him and a young woman right behind him and yelling in Spanish. As Tracey scrabbled to his feet the man grabbed him by the collar with one big fist and drove the other hard into his stomach and the breath blew out of Tracey and he sagged in the man’s grip. The woman jumped on the big man’s back and clawed his face and the man cursed and bucked her off onto the floor. He still held Ben Tracey breathless in his grasp as he wiped at his scratched face and the woman scrambled to her feet and came at him once more. He hooked her in the jaw and set her tumbling unconscious on the floor, her skirt riding up high and exposing much of her fetching legs.

Hanford Mobley laughed and cried out, “Whoooo!”

John Ashley pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the back of the big man’s head and cocked the piece and said, “That’ll do, bubba.”

The big man went still and let Ben Tracy fall, Tracey braced himself on all fours and vomited loudly. The man in the tuxedo muttered, “Oh, for pity’s sake.” Ray Lynn went to Ben and helped him to his feet and led him away toward the front door. Ben was still struggling for breath.

The big man slowly turned and John Ashley had to look up to meet his eyes. “You best get that thing out my face before I make you eat it,” the big man said.

John Ashley brought his knee up hard into the man’s balls and the man grunted and lunged forward at the waist with his eyes wide and John Ashley held his thumb tight over the hammer and hit the man across the nose with the pistol barrel. The man’s legs gave way and he dropped to the knees with a great moan and both bands clapped to his nose and blood running through his fingers. John Ashley kicked him in the chest and he fell over on his side and curled up protectively, still clutching his face.

Hanford Mobley went to the woman and knelt beside her and checked her pulse at her neck. He looked at John Ashley and said, “She’s all right.” He looked on her legs for a moment and then lifted the hem of her skirt to peek at her white panties and the little black hairs curling out from the underwear’s edges at her pubic mound. He looked up at John Ashley and grinned.

“Oh man—you’re bad as that damn Tracey,” John Ashley said. “Let’s go.” He turned and headed for the door.

Hanford Mobley hastened outside after him and got behind the wheel of the car and John cranked up the motor. In the backseat Ray Lynn said to Ben Tracey, “Didnt I tell you not to fuck around with a woman with a dredge operator for a boyfriend? Didnt I? She’s a looker. I’ll admit it—but those fucken dredgers are some mean-ass mothersons.”

Ben Tracey wiped with his shirttail at the vomit and blood on his mouth. “That wasnt him,” he said. Hanford wheeled the Ford out of the lot and headed for the boulevard.

“That wasnt the dredger fella the gal warned you about?” Ray Lynn said.

“Nuh-uh,” Ben said. “He’s with a crew over to Ford Myers right now and wont be back for a coupla weeks yet.” He nodded at John Ashley and said, “Good seein you, Johnny,” the gestured at Hanford Mobley and said, “Who’s the youngster?”

“My nephew Hannie,” John Ashley said. “So who the hell was that peckerwood thumpin on you?”

Ben Tracey shrugged. “Big honker come tearing in through the kitchen door just as I had her up against the bar and was kissing on her and copping me some tit. Hollerin he was gonna break my neck for snakin his girl. You know what? I believe the bitch got her a few more boyfriends than she let on.”

John Ashley laughed. “You think so, hey? You really dont know who the fella was?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” Ben Tracey said.

“He damn near did,” Ray Lynn said, “if that gal you called a bitch hadnt lent you a hand. Her and Johnny here.”

Ben Tracey laughed along with them.

The deskman of the McAllister Hotel told them he was sorry but the hotel was completely booked. John Ashley slid a fifty-dollar bill across the counter and asked him to check his book again and the clerk found that, oh yes, there were two rooms available after all. They checked in and got cleaned up and then went downstairs and treated themselves to a steak dinner in the hotel restaurant. John Ashley said the town wasnt as much fun anymore. “It’s bigger and faster and louder,” he said, “but just look at em.” He swept him fork through the air in a gesture that took in the crowded restaurant and the thronged sidewalk just beyond the large plate glass windows. “They strainin so hard to have a good time they aint havin no fun at all, you can see it in their face.”

They repaired to the Elser Pier dancehall but it now had a bouncer at the door and he recognized Ben Tracey for trouble he’d caused in the past and would not permit him to enter. Hard words ensure but Ray Lynn pulled Ben away before a fight broke out. “Who’s that son of a bitch think he’s callin a troublemaker?” Ben said. They went out to the sidewalk and stood there smoking cigarettes and Ray Lynn suggested they go to Old Hardieville and get laid. Ben seconded the idea. Hanford looked at John and shrugged and said, “Why the hell not? I’m engaged but I ain’t gelded.”

So they went to The Palmetto House Inn, and even though the others made fun of him and said Laura had him damn well pussy-whipped, John Ashley just grinned and remained in the parlor to smoke and talk with some of the girls while his friends had their lark upstairs.

Quite early the next morning they drove north out of town on the Dixie Highway. They pulled in at a Fort Lauderdale roadhouse for a breakfast of eggs and pork chops and grits. Their plan thus far was vague. They would first of all have to find out when Bob Baker would be home. That much John Ashley had decided: he would kill him at home and then burn down his house as Bobby had burned his. He had not dreamt again of his daddy since deciding on his course of action.

Late in the forenoon they came to West Palm Beach and all pulled their hats low and tried to keep their faces averted from the street and any who might recognize them. John Ashley pointed down a dirt road branching off the highway into a woodland and said, “That’s the way to Bobby’s house. Bout five miles yonderway.”

Hanford Mobley slowed the car. “You wanna go on over there and see if he’s home? He might be sitting in his easy chair this minute and reading the newspaper and smokin his pipe and feelin on top of the damn world. We can hide the car in the trees a ways from the house and sneak up on him. If he’s there you can settle the thing right goddamn now.”

John Ashley hesitated. Then said: “No. If he aint there his wife’ll tell him about the strange car that come up to the house today. I dont want him on his guard. Besides, when I do him we’re gonna have to haul ass. Best we go see Ma and the girls now, while everything’s nice and quiet. We’ll see does Clarence want in on it and we’ll plan the thing out and see about when Bobby’s gonna be home.”

“What if he’s home tonight?” Hanford said.

“Then tonight’s it,” John Ashley said.

Hanford Mobley thumped his fist on the steering wheel and grinned.

So they drove on. And five miles away Bob Baker—who’d been up late the night before investigating an abandoned rum truck his deputies had discovered by the side of the highway with half its load missing and blood on the cab seat—napped soundly in his front porch hammock and without dreams and with no firearm to hand while his wife and daughters tended the flower garden in the backyard.

Ma Ashley had rarely been demonstrative in her affections but she wept happily to see her son John whom she thought she might never behold again and she hugged him hard to her breast. His sisters held to him one on either arm and petted him and laughed delightedly at every wisecrack he made. Clarence Middleton came up and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “I guess I know why you come back.”

Ma and the girls got busy preparing dinner while the men sat out on the little front porch and formed a plan. They had earlier stopped at a filling station near the Olympia depot and John Ashley used the telephone there to call the sheriff’s office in Stuart and ask for deputy Abner Franks, long a friend and a valued informant to the family. He told Abner what he wanted to know and Abner said to call back in twenty minutes. They bought bottles of beer from the filling station’s backroom and sipped them slowly and remarked on the prettiness of the day. When John Ashley called Abner again the deputy was craftily circumspect in his end of the conversation, surrounded as he was by other cops in the office, but in his careful way he was able to tell John Ashley that, yes, it seemed the sheriff would be at home this evening and, no, there was no likelihood that any other policemen would be there. John thanked him for the information and told him to forget this conversation had taken place. Abner Franks said, “What conversation?” and rang off.

Now John Ashley told Clarence Middleton what he had in mind and Clarence said he was in. “Your daddy was never nothin but good to me and I’ll be proud to help you see that Baker sumbitch dead for killin him. truth to tell, Johnny, I was sore disappointed the last time I saw you and you were off to Texas without settlin accounts with that damn sheriff.”

“I was sore disappointed too, Clarence,” John Ashley said. “I just didnt know it yet.”

But Clarence declined John’s invitation to go back to Texas with him. He’d recently spoken to his brother Jack by telephone, their first exchange in years, and Jack’s offer of a partnership in the nightclub still held if Clarence gave up his life of crime. “I believe I’ll take him up on it,” Clarence said. “I’ll go with you boys on this one out of respect for Old Joe, and then I’m out of it.”

Their plan was simple. They’d wait until late that night and then drive out to Bob Baker’s house and park the car a ways from the house and John Ashley would sneak up and slip inside and kill him. Ben and Ray would stay with the car and keep an eye out for anyone coming down the road. Clarence would keep watch outside the house. Hanford would go in with John to guard his back. As soon as Bob Baker was dead they’d set the place afire and get out of there before the flames lit up the night and drew notice.

“What about his family?” Clarence wanted to know.

“We’ll put em outside and leave em to watch the place burn down like Ma and the girls had to watch Twin Oaks burn,” John Ashley said. Besides, Bobby’s family would be a help to them in their getaway. “We’ll drop a coupla loud hints about goin to Key west,” John said. “The cops’ll be two weeks findin out we aint there. By then we’ll be long gone and forever.”

They would take a rest in Vero, at Wayne Lillis’s piling house at the marina where he kept his charter boat. Then they would push on to Jacksonville and take Clarence to his brother’s club. John and Hanford and Ray would visit with Daisy and Butch for the night and the next day head for Pensacola and a steamer to Texas.

“And then what?” Hanford Mobley said.

“And then we live happily ever after,” John Ashley said with a grin. “What else?”

“Sounds pretty fucken fine to me,” Ray Lynn said.

They told the plan to Ma Ashley over dinner and she got wet-eyed with gratitude that she would not go to her grave with her husband unavenged.

After dinner there was naught to do but pass the time until dark. Around midafternoon Ray put down for a nap on the front porch. Hanford and Clarence stretched out under one of the big oaks shading the house. Ben hiked down to Yellow Creek with a cane pole and a can of nightcrawlers. John Ashley watered and fed the milkcow in the makeshift stable Bill had put up and then he wrung the necks on three chickens for his mother to fry for supper.

Ma sent Scout and Jaybird to the creek to check the trotline and bring back any fish or cooters they found on it. She told them to pull a pailful of sweet potatoes from the garden on their way back. When John Ashley came into the kitchen minutes later with the three plucked hens she said his rattlebrained sisters had forgotten to take a bucket for the sweet potatoes and asked him to take one to them.

He found Jaybird on the path coming back from the creek. She was carrying a string of three catfish in one hand and held a headless snapping turtle by the tail in the other. She was looking back over her shoulder as she came and did not see him until he was almost to her and then she gave a startled gasp and stopped short.

“You best watch where you goin, girl,” John Ashley said, “before you step on somethin you wish you hadnt. Give me them and take this.” He took the fish and turtle from her and handed her the pail. “How’d you expect to bring back any sweet taters with no bucket?”

Only now did he notice her nervousness. She glanced back down the path again and then looked at him and everything in her manner bespoke unease. He looked along the narrow sun-dappled path flanked by moss-hung oaks and pine and dense palmetto shrubs. “What is it, girl?” he said.

Her eyes on him were large and fearful. He looked down the empty path again. “Where’s Scout?”

She shook her had and shrugged and glanced down the path and then said, “She’ll be along.”

John Ashley put the fish and turtle into the pail she held and started down the path and Jay came after him, saying with low-voice vehemence, “Leave her be, Johnny! She said she’d be along and to leave her be!” He turned and pointed at her and said, “Get on up to the house, Jay. And dont forget the sweet potatoes. Go on now.”

Jaybird watched him go off and then turned and hurried for the house.

He went along the path without footfall nor rustle of brush, halting every few yards to listen intently. As he neared the creek he heard them in the woods to his right. Half-smothered laughter. He eased through the palmettos and wove through the tightly clustered pines toward where the trees opened up in a clearing beside the creek. He advanced in a crouch to a dense growth of bushes at the edge of the clearing and peered through the shrubbery and saw them sitting together on a fallen pine.

She sat with her knees drawn up and he was astraddle the trunk and had one hand around her waist and one at her breast and was kissing her cheek and neck and whispering in her ear. She was smiling and blushing furiously and she had hold of his hand at her breath but John Ashley could see that she was not trying to push it away. Now Ben removed his hand to fumble at the fly of his trousers and then took her hand and put it to himself and her eyes went huge and she looked sidelong at the thing in her grip as though she were afraid to look at it directly and yet she permitted him to move her hand on him in a stroking motion and thats when John Ashley came charging out of the bushes.

Scout shrieked and leaped away from Ben and yelled, “No, Johnny!” Ben was up and shoving his penis back in his pants and saying something but John Ashley wasnt listening. his punch caught Ben on the nose and broke it and sent him tripping backward over the log. As he scrambled to hands and knees Ben yelled “She didnt mind, man!” and John Ashley kicked him in the ribs with enough force to lift him partway off the ground. Ben fell over on his back and could not catch his breath and John Ashley stepped up to him and brought the heel of his brogan down squarely in his face and felt bone and teeth give way.

Now Scout had him by an arm and was pulling at him and crying, “Stop! Stop it!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and pitched her aside and turned back to Ben who again was risen to all fours and pouring blood from his mouth and nose. He kicked him in the side of the head and blood slung as Ben fell over and tried to scrabble away and John Ashley followed after and kicked him in the face and Ben fell on his side and curled up tight with his arms around his head.

A pistolshot cracked and Scout’s wails cut short and John Ashley whirled in a crouched to Ray Lynn at the edge of the clearing with a revolver cocked and pointed at him.

“No more, Johnny, you’ll kill him,” Ray Lynn said. Jaybird stood back of him and partly behind a pine with her hands to her mouth and tears running down her face.

John Ashley straightened up and stared at Ray Lynn. Ben Tracey lay on his side gasping wetly and unevenly. And now here came Clarence and Hanford with guns in their hands and they took in the scene at a glance and Hanford aimed his pistol at Ray Lynn’s head and said, “Get that off him, bubba.”

“Hannie,” John Ashley said. he gestured for him to put his gun down.

“Him first,” Hanford said.

Ray Lynn sighed softly and put his pistol in his pants pocket. Hanford stepped back from him and lowered his own gun but kept it in hand. Scout shouted, “Damn you, Johnny!” and ran off toward the house with Jaybird right behind her.

Ben Tracey coughed and choked and turned onto his stomach with a loud groan and braced himself on his elbows and spewed blood. Clarence squatted beside him to examine his injuries. One side of his face was already enpurpled and grossly swollen and he lacked most of his top row of teeth. Each time he coughed he grimaced and expelled a mist of blood a little brighter than that running off his broken mouth. “I’d say his ribs’re all busted up and could be one nicked a lung,” Clarence said. “I knew a fella one time got a rib though his lung and drowned in his own blood.”

John Ashley looked on Ben Tracey with disgust. “She’s but barely fourteen, you son of a bitch.” Ben Tracey did not even try to look up at him.

“Let me get him to the hospital, Johnny,” Ray Lynn said. “It’s no need t let him die.”

“That dick of yours gone get you killed,” John Ashley said, still glowering at Ben Tracey. “I ever see you again—anywhere—I’m like to rip it off and shove it down your throat. You understand?”

Ben Tracey nodded awkwardly.

“Get his worthless ass out of here,” John Ashley said, and started back for the house with Hanford right behind.

Clarence helped Ray to get Ben Tracey back to a car, Ben crying out at every misstep or sudden jolt. As they drove him to the hospital at Stuart, Ben kept fading in and out of consciousness. The woods along the highway were already in deep twilight. They parked at the emergency entrance door and left the motor running while they supported him on either side and walked him inside and turned him over to a pair of nurses. Clarence told them he’d fallen off a scaffolding. One of the nurses said they’d have to fill out a form at the admitting desk and Clarence said, “Sure, just let me move my car from blocking the emergency entrance.” Then he and Ray Lynn went out and got in the car and drove away.

But they had not thought to relieve Ben Tracey of the pistol tucked snugly in his waistband under his loose shirt, and when the nurse undressing him found it she did not even touch it but hastened bigeyed to her supervisor who returned with her to the ward and took the pistol from unconscious Ben and then telephoned the police.

Sheriff Bob Baker arrived home a little after dark in a sporadically gusting wind and under a roiling sky of gathering stormclouds. His wife and daughters met him at the door and after receiving her kiss he bent to the girls so they could kiss him in their turn. The girls then repaired to their room and Annie went into the kitchen to fetch for him a glass of iced tea. He hung up his gunbelt in the den and took off his boots then went to the dining room where Annie had set the tea on the table. He laced the drink strongly with some of the dark Jamaican rum from the jug he kept in the sideboard, then went to the parlor and settled into his rocker with the latest issue of the American Mercury. He was glad to be indoors and out of the bad weather bunching up. He lit his pipe and added the roasted-nut smell of its smoke to the redolence of a pot roast nearly ready.

He was the picture of contentment, but in truth he had in recent months been visited by a chronic and awful dream—a vague vision of John Ashley looming over him with one eyesocket dark and empty, and sometimes at his side his brother Bob, naked and ghostly pale. He would come awake in a gasping lurch that would wake his wife as well. She would hold him close until he recovered his breath and his tremors eased. But she never asked to know the dream and he never offered to tell it.

Sometimes he’d sit at his desk in the den and take out the bullet John Ashley had sent him. He’d hold it in his palm and roll it under his finger and a great smothering rage would close upon him so tightly he could barely draw breath. But those moments—like the unsettling dream—had of late become less frequent, and he was confident they soon would cease altogether. There had not been a single reliable sighting of John Ashley anywhere in Florida in more than three months. According to some of Bob Baker’s informants, John Ashley had been badly wounded in the whiskey camp fight and his arm had since been amputated. He was gone to Georgia or Texas, maybe to California. And the rumor was he was sworn not to return.

Bob Baker was eating his supper when the telephone rang. Annie got up to answer it in the parlor. He heard her soft muted voice and then she was back to tell him it was Deputy Elmer Padgett on the line. Elmer apologized for interrupting his supper but just a few minutes ago there had been a head-on collision on the Dixie Highway about four miles north of town. Two carloads of kids. Three dead, four injured—two of them in awful bad condition. Both cars reeking of hooch.

“Slim called it in from Riviera,” Elmer Padgett said. “He’s back at the scene waitin for an ambulance. He thought you’d want to know one of the criticals is Commissioner Jensen’s daughter. Slim says she was in the backseat of one of the cars and, ah, her skirt was up around her waist and she wasnt wearin no underpants is what he said. The boy back there with her, his pants was wrapped around his ankles. He’s dead with a broke neck. Slim says it sure enough looks like they was goin at it when the cars hit.” Elmer chortled. “Hell, man, I can think of worse ways to go.”

“Quit,” Sheriff Bob said. “It aint funny.”

“No sir, I’m sorry.”

Bob Baker sighed. Damn cars. Kids could go off to who knew where and do every kind of wickedness in them. The automobile was the ruination of morality in the young, no question about it. And now Commissioner Jensen’s daughter—a situation as much political as tragic. Elmer had been right to call him about it. He’d have to do it all himself, write up the accident report and go to the commissioner’s house to break the news to him in person and then visit the newspaper office and make sure that the business about drinking and nakedness and who knew what else did not get into print. It looked to be a long night ahead—and a nasty one, judging by the sound of the wind in the trees and the flicker of sheet lightning at the window.

Elmer said he was calling from headquarters and could stop by for him unless he wanted to take his own car. Sheriff Bob said to come get him, then hung up and went to the den to put on his boots and gun and get a rain slicker. Annie took his half-finished supper off the table and covered it and set it in the over. She asked him to call home before he started back so she could warm it up by the time he arrived.

“Probably be awful late before I get this wrapped up,” he said. “You’re like to be sleepin.”

“I dont mind,” she said.

Then Elmer arrived and Bob Baker went out and got in the car and they left.

Two hours later the telephone shrilled again. It was Deputy Grover Pass calling from the hospital in Stuart. She had to press the receiver to her ear tightly to hear him clearly above the rain drumming on the roof. he asked Annie Baker to please tell Sheriff Bob to call him there as soon as she saw him or heard from him. It was awful important. Of course, she said in her soft pleasant accent, of course she would.

It’s all so awful important, she thought, as she hung the receiver back in its cradle.

By the time they arrived at West Palm Beach the wind was whipping the trees and lightning was branching brightly and thunderclaps shook the air. Hanford Mobley turned off onto the dirt lane leading through the pinewoods to Bob Baker’s house and switched off the Ford’s headlamps. Clarence Middleton kept watch through the rear window but there was no one behind them. As they approached a bend in the road they suddenly made out a faint light through the trees and Hanford stopped the car. Through a series of back-and-forth wheelings he turned the vehicle around on the narrow road to face back toward the highway and then carefully backed off the road and into the deeper shadows of the pines. They checked their weapons once again and then John Ashley and Hanford Mobley, each armed with a pump-action shotgun and a .45, got out of the car into the blowing rain. Hanford took the one-gallon can of gasoline Clarence handed him and they started walking toward the house, keeping to she shadows of the roadside trees. Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn remained in the car to keep watch for anyone who might come down the road.

The rain was hard and cold and rattled through the hardwood leaves and pocked the muddy road. In seconds their clothes were stuck to their skins. They saw Bob Baker’s green Ford runabout parked in front of the house. A large front window of the house showed bright yellow. They came across the yard at an angle to avoid its misty cast of light. The room at the front corner was unlighted and they edged past it and moved along the front of the house and past the stonework of the chimney and stopped at the lighted window. They peeked in through slightly-parted curtains and saw a parlor with plush furniture. One of Bob Baker’s cob pipes was propped in an ashtray on a table beside an armchair. They went up onto the porch, stepping lightly, and moved to the front door. John Ashley tried the knob and it turned.

He slipped into a foyer and Hanford Mobley stepped lightly after him and gingerly set down the can of gasoline. A gust of wind came in behind them and fluttered the pages of a wall calendar. Hanford eased the door to and they stood motionless and listened for voice or footfall but heard only the falling rain and the water running off their sopping clothes onto the wooden floor. With his shotgun at port arms John Ashley moved ahead into the parlor and again stopped. The room was well-lighted by table lamps at opposite walls. He looked down at the carpet muting the water dripping off their sopping clothes. He’d known no one who lived in houses with carpeting except whores. The rain was falling even harder now and the crashes of thunder came more loudly and more closely together and quivered the floor under his feet.

The parlor gave onto a dining room just ahead and it too was bright with lamplight. A hallway led off to their right between the parlor and dining room, and to their left, across the parlor, was another open hallway. The house was spacious and warm and seemed to John Ashley a comfortable place to live. He knew bob Baker had lived here since before his daddy died and he became the sheriff. John Ashley suddenly felt strange in some way he couldn’t define—and then his uncertainty became anger. Just do it, he told himself. Find the bastard and do it.

He went forward and paused before the hallway to the right and craned his neck to see into it. There was a closed door on either side of the hall but no light showed under either door. He peered into the dining room and saw another door, this one ajar, to the left, and from beyond it now heard the muted sound of voices. He looked back at Hanford Mobley and gestured and Hanford looking into the dining room and saw the door and now heard the murmuring voices and nodded and tightened his grip on the shotgun.

They moved silently to the dining room door and paused there and John Ashley listened hard for Bob Baker’s voice but heard only those of children and that of a woman: “All right now, we need to beat four eggs.” He looked at Hanford Mobley behind him and gestured for him to back out into the parlor and he followed after.

“I dont think he’s in there,” John whispered at Hanford’s ear. “Could be he’s sleepin.” He nodded toward the near hallway and led the way into it. Standing to the side so he would not be framed by the doorway, he eased open the door on the left and listened for sound in the darkness within and heard none. He crouched and peered into the room and after a moment made out in the dimness that it was the children’s bedroom and the two beds were empty. He pulled the door to and moved across the hall and opened the other door in the same way, again crouching before peeking inside. Another bedroom, the window curtains open. In a quivering blue flash of lightning he saw a large neatly made bed and that no one was in the room.

They crossed back through the parlor to the other hallway and the door to their right opened into a bathroom and John Ashley and Hanford Mobley looked at each other with raised brows at this luxury Bob Baker had added to the house. The other door opened into Bobby’s den. John Ashley waited for lightning to illuminate the room and reveal that no one was inside, the went to the lamp on the desk and lifted the glass and lit the wick with a match. A rack of guns on one wall held shotguns both pump and breech-break, carbines both bolt and lever. On another wall was a row of animal heads—a ten-point and a twelve-point buck, and two wild boars, their little red eyes looking almost alive, their tusks shining whitely in the lamplight against their black bristly hides. One of them wore a St. Louis Browns baseball cap at jaunty sideward tilt and had a cigarette in its mouth. Several fishing rods stood clustered in a corner, and on a table beside them was a litter of tackle and reels and lures. Over the roll-shaded window was mounted a largemouth that looked to scale at least fifteen pounds.

“I bet he really likes it in here—in this whole damn house,” Hanford Mobley whispered. “It’s gonna be a pure-dee pleasure to burn it down.”

The window shade went blue-white with lightning, and the almost simultaneous blast of thunder rattled the window. John Ashley opened the righthand desk drawer and saw within a gunbelt with a holstered .38 revolver, and a bottle of dark rum. He let the gun alone but took out the rum and uncapped the bottle and took a drink and passed the rum to Hanford Mobley whose deep swallow bubbled the bottle. Now John Ashley opened the shallow middle drawer. It held a few pencils and pens and gum erasers and blank sheets of paper. And a bullet. He recognized it at once and grinned and took it out and set in on its base on the desktop.

“He’s not home,” Annie Baker said.

They whirled around with shotguns up and Annie Baker gasped and lunged back from the door with her hands up to her mouth.

“Dont move,” John Ashley said. “Not a muscle.” He hollered, “Bobby! I’ll blow her damn head off, you dont show yourself with your hands up.”

“He isnt home, I told—”

There was a brilliant white flash at the window and an enormous ripping sound and an explosive blast of thunder that shook the house. And then a wailing of children and a loud call of “Momma!”

Annie Baker looked down the hallway and called, “It’s all right, girls, I’m—” and then squatted with open arms to receive her two daughters rushing to her. “I told you to stay put,” she said, but her rebuke was without temper. The girls held tight to her, crying with their faces against her breasts.

“We tole you dont move, goddammit!” Hanford Mobley said. He was aiming his shotgun at her as though at some distant target.

The woman stood and held her whimpering daughters to her skirt. “You’re scaring the children,” she said. “Arent you ashamed, the both of you?”

“God damn it, woman, I’m—”

“Please dont use profanity in front of my daughters.”

“Shit, lady, you dont—”

“Hush up, Hannie,” John Ashley said. “Take that gun off her.” He held his own shotgun with the muzzle toward the floor. He had seen occasional photographs of Bobby’s wife in the newspapers over the years and now reflected that the pictures had not done her justice. “Miz Baker? You tellin me true he aint home?”

“It’s the truth. See for yourselves if you like and then please go away.”

“I know thats his car out there.”

“He was called away to a highway accident,” she said. “A deputy came for him.” The rain clattered hard on the roof and lightning flickered and flared almost without pause and one thunderclap followed on another.

“Well hell, we’ll just wait for him,” Hanford Mobley said. “We’ll lay for him right here and give him a big surprise when he gets back.”

The look on Annie Baker’s face reminded John Ashley of the way Bertha looked that night at Bill’s just before she’d run tearfully from the room—and the way Laura looked as she waved goodbye from the dock. He suddenly had a feeling they all three understood something important he did not. In that moment he somehow knew that this woman truly loved Bobby Baker and likely always would. And in some way as inexplicable he knew too—though he knew it only as a feeling, as an understanding beyond language—that Bobby did not know she loved him, that he could not know it, not if she told him so every day for the rest of his life, no matter how she might try to show him that she did. The realization came to him that nothing he might do to Bob Baker could be as bad as having to live in such a circumstance, in such…what? Emptiness. In such emptiness of the heart.

He sensed all this in the span of a heartbeat. And then wished he were with Laura right that minute, wished they were in their bed in Galveston with moonshine or rain either one falling over them through the window.

Well hell, boy, all you got to do is to do it.

He put the shotgun barrel up on his shoulder and smiled at Annie Baker. The woman’s eyes were intent upon him and now they suddenly filled and she showed a small uncertain smile.

“Let’s go, Hannie,” He said. “I cant wait to get shut of this place and get down to Key West.”

Hanford Mobley looked at him like he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. “Say what? How come? We can lay for him right here and—”

John Ashley was still looking at Annie Baker and now his grin widened. “And from Key West a boat to Mexico, where the arm of the law dont reach too good.” He glanced at Hanford and said, “Let’s go,” and started from the room.

Hanford came rushing after him. “Goddamn, John, what’s going on? The son of a bitch killed Granddaddy. It aint right we—”

“He didnt do any such a thing,” John Ashley said tiredly as he crossed the parlor to the front door where he stood and looked back at Hanford. “Daddy always done exactly what he wanted and he died the same way.”

Hanford Mobley snatched up the gasoline can and said, “Well we damn sure ought to burn down his fucken house! He burned down my momma and daddy’s house and I aim to pay him in kind.”

John Ashley grabbed the can from him. “We aint burnin nothin. It aint just Bobby’s house, Hannie, it’s them’s.” He gestured at Annie Baker and her daughters, standing on the other side of the room and watching them. “Hell, it’s more them’s than Bobby’s. What we got against them?” He put a hand on Hanford’s shoulder. “Listen. Let’s just go, all right?”

Hanford Mobley shook his head and cursed under his breath and followed his uncle into the tempestuous night.

And Annie Baker hurried to the door and shut it hard against the buffeting storm.

A year earlier, following Clarence Middleton’s and Ray Lynn’s getaway from a road gang the day after John Ashley escaped from Raiford, Sheriff Bob Baker had requested and received from the state penitentiary the prison records of all three men and of all convicts who’d been known to associate with them. Each convict’s folder included a photograph. After studying the material, Bob Baker had put it all in his Ashley Gang file. He had since made it policy for his officers to check any strangers arrested in Palm Beach County against the photos and descriptions in the Raiford records. And so, when Deputy Grover Pass received a telephone call from the station in Stuart information him that the local hospital had reported a battered patient armed with a pistol when he was admitted, he took the Ashley Gang file and drove up to Stuart in a furious thunderstorm and went to the hospital ward to have a look at this patient who said his name was Walter Jones.

Deputy Pass had a good eye for features, and despite the man’s battered aspect, he recognized him as the same man in one of the prison photographs in the file. The file report said the man’s name was Ben Tracey and that he had been in the same cell block and work gang as John Ashley and Ray Lynn. He had served out his sentence only a short time before their escapes.

The battered man had watched Deputy Pass carefully as he looked back and forth from his face to each photograph in turn. When he looked twice at the same photo and then grinned, the man had said, “Shut,” through his mutilated mouth and broken nose. Deputy Pass cuffed Ben Tracey’s wrist to the bed and went to the desk to call Sheriff Baker. Several of the other ward patients had been looking on and fell to murmured speculation among themselves. In a neighboring bed a man with two broken legs grinned at Ben Tracey and said, “Sometimes it aint no end of trouble, is it?” Ben Tracey glared at him and said, “Uck you.”

It was dawn when the sheriff arrived at the hospital. After visiting with the commissioner whose daughter had been injured in the car crash and then stopping by the newspaper office in West Palm Beach to have a talk with the night editor, he had called the station to check in and the desk clerk had relayed Grover Pass’s message to call him at the Stuart hospital. When Grover told him he had arrested a patient who might be in the Ashley Gang, Bob Baker ordered the suspect moved to a private room and a pair of deputies placed on guard at his door. He then had Elmer Padgett drive him directly to Stuart. The wind had fallen off and the thunder and lightning had ceased their action, but the rain yet fell.

The interrogation did not take long. When Bob Baker asked Ben Tracey where John Ashley might be found, Ben said, “Uck you wid a arden hose.” Bob Baker said he had him for bank robbery but would drop all charges against him in exchange for information on John Ashley and his gang. “Aint no rat,” Ben Tracey said. Bob Baker stood over him and gently laid a hand on his bandaged chest and repeated his question. Tracey cursed him once more and Bob Baker leaned hard on his chest.

Tracey’s quavering scream brought nurses on the run but the two cops outside the closed door would not permit them to enter the room. One of the nurses ran off to find a doctor but she was ten minutes in returning with one in tow and by then Ben Tracey had come to see the wisdom in accepting Bob Baker’s deal and had hastily confided all he knew about John Ashley’s immediate intentions. The sheriff was already on his way out of the hospital when the doctor arrived.

Bob Baker told Elmer Padgett to round up his brought Joel and deputies L. B. Thomas and Henry Stubbs and get up to Fort Pierce as quick as they could and call on St. Lucie County Sheriff J. R. Merritt. “I’m puttin you boys in his charge. Tell him exactly what this Tracey shitbird told us,” Bob Baker said. “If he aint lyin and the Ashley bunch stopped to see their bubba in Vero tonight, J.R. can maybe catch up to them there, or maybe further along the road. They got no reason to think we know their plan, so they got no call to be in a hurry. I’m gonna go check on Annie and the back at the house. Keep me posted.”

He took the car they’d come in and Elmer took the guard deputies’ car and followed him out to the Dixie Highway. There Bob Baker turned south for West Palm Beach and Elmer wheeled north to the county sheriff’s station in Stuart where he would telephone his brother and the other two and tell them to get up to Stuart right now and he would explain things to them on the way to Fort Pierce.

Bob Baker did not telephone his wife before heading home. It had occurred to him that on finding he was not at home John Ashley might have decided to wait at the house in ambush for him. If so, he did not want to tip him off that he was coming.

The morning was darkly gray with lingering storm clouds. He turned onto the muddy road to his house and slowed to hardly more than walking speed. He studied the wooden sides of the road carefully in search of a waiting car but did not see one. He stopped at the bend in the road and regarded the house, some forty yards distant. There was a light in the parlor window but nothing looked out of the ordinary. He jacked a round in the chamber of his pump action and got out and headed for the porch. Before he got halfway there the door swung open and he raised the shotgun and had his finger on the trigger before he saw it was Annie silhouetted in the light from inside.

He looked in on the sleeping girls from their door and then softly shut it again. he made Annie sit on the couch in the parlor and tell him everything, and she did—all of it, including John Ashley’s remark about going to Key West to catch a boat to Mexico. She told him everything except about the smile John Ashley had given her. A smile that had given her ease, though she could not have explained why.

Bob Baker looked off to the hallway leading to his daughters’ room and looked at the muddy tracks across the carpet from one hallway to the other. She felt the heat of his raging eyes and said, “They didnt scare the girls, Robert. The girls were scared of the storm more than anything.”

“They brought gasoline in the house?” Bob Baker said. “And they didnt use it?”

“The little one, Hannie, he wanted to, but John wouldnt let him.”

“John?” His look was as accusatory as his tone. “Hannie?”

“Those are their names, arent they?” She reached out to put her hand on his arm but he abruptly stood up and began packing. She watched him for a moment and then said softly, “I had the feeling he didnt really want to be here. Whatever it was he had against you…well, I dont think it matters to him anymore. I had the feeling he was going away. He wont come back here again, Robert, I know he wont.”

Bob Baker turned to glare at her. “Since when did you get to know so awful much about him?”

She looked at him a moment, her aspect unfathomable to him, and then got up and walked down the hall and into the bedroom and gently closed the door.

He went to the kitchen and poured a tall glass of cold tea and sugar and then added rum from the sideboard jug. Then he returned to the parlor and turned off the lamp and sat in the gray gloom of the morning and of his own thoughts and drank slowly.

Sneak up and shoot you dead while you were sleeping is what he meant to do. When he saw you werent here he run off because he’s too cowardly to try to shoot you any way but in your sleep.

That wasnt true and he knew it. The man was a sonofabitch but he wasnt a coward nor a backshooter.

Why’d he leave? Why not lay an ambush for when he got home? How come he didnt burn the house? He’d come ready to.

He drank and thought. Annie was right, the man was leaving. Not to Key West and Mexico. That was a bullshit story meant to distract him from looking for them along the upper coast until they were long gone. Jesus. How damn stupid did they think he was?

Well, he thought, he would either get away from J.R. and the boys or he wouldnt. In either case it would finally be done with.

He fell asleep in the chair and when next he woke it was the middle of the afternoon. His neck was sore. He could hear Annie and the girls laughing faintly in the kitchen. The parlor window was softly bright with sunlight. He got up and went to the kitchen and the girls rushed to him for a hug and Annie smiled and said she hadnt had the heart to wake him from the chair, he’d been so deeply asleep. He asked if anyone had telephoned and no one had. He assumed Sheriff Merritt and the deputies had not found Ashley and his gang in Vero or anywhere else. The man was gone, he was sure of it. He couldnt help smiling, and Annie herself seemed to brighten in the light of the good cheer.

He sat and sipped coffee and chatted with his daughters while Annie fried a steak and potatoes for him and sliced bread to toast in the pan with the steak juice. He cleaned his plate and then had a large serving of peach pie for dessert. Then his daughters took turns showing off for him by reading aloud long passages from their schoolbooks. He had not enjoyed himself this way in longer than he could recall.

Evening came on. While Annie fixed a fresh pot of coffee he called the station to see if his deputies had returned from St. Lucie County yet or files at report. The desk officer said he had been just about to call him. Elmer Padgett had telephoned not give minutes ago with a message.

“He said tell you they’re at the Sebastian River Bridge,” the desk officer said. “Said to tell you, ‘We’re on em,’ in exactly them words. I asked what that meant and he said you’d know. What the hell’s Elmer and them doing way up in St. Lucie, Sheriff?”

Bob Baker hung up and stared at the parlor window gone dark with nightfall.

It wasnt done with.

“We’re on them” wasnt the same as “We got them.” What if he was to get away? Maybe Tracey was bullshitting about Johnny wanting to go to Texas for good. Maybe Tracey was trying to put him off his guard. Maybe Johnny had been bullshitting Tracey.

Even if he did go away, who was to say he wouldnt be back? He’d gone twice now and come back both times. Tracey said he’d come back this time just to kill him. He had no trouble believing that.

Bob Baker could not have explained what he felt at the moment but its similarity to fear was enraging.

“Here you are, sir,” Annie said brightly at his side, holding out to him a steaming mug of coffee. He turned to her and she saw his face and her smile vanished.

He mumbled something about paperwork and turned away without taking the coffee and went to the den. He lit the lamp in his room and saw the rifle bullet set upright on the desk.

His chest went so tight he could hardly breathe. A sudden red pressure swelled behind his eyes.

Son of a bitch.

He heard John Ashley’s laughter as plainly as when he’d run off in the rain after busting his head against the jailhouse wall, as plainly as when he took his leg and gun.

He could see him grinning as big as when he came out of the pineywoods behind Julie.

Julie. He could in this moment smell her hair and remember the feel of her breath on his face. Could see her eyes and how they shone for him. And then shone for him no more after she’d been to the woods with John Ashley.

He picked up the bullet and closed his hand so tightly around it his fist trembled.

And then howled and drove the fist into the desktop and his knuckles left their imprint in the heavy wood.

And then spun and snatched up his gunbelt and stalked out to his runabout and roared away through the night toward the highway.