The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

James Crumley Hostages

From Measures of Poison

Between the hammer of the midwestern sun and the relentless sweep of the bone-dry wind, the small town of Wheatshocker seemed crushed flat and just about to blow across the plains. Long billows of dust filled the empty streets like strings of fog. Male dogs learned to squat or leaned against withered fence posts so the wind wouldn’t blow them over when they lifted their legs to pee. The piss dried instantly on the sere dirt, then blew away before the dogs finished. Shadows as black as tar huddled protectively in the shallow dunes that lined the few buildings left on the main street. Most of the windowfronts were as empty as a fool’s laugh, while those with glass were etched in formless shapes by the sharp, ghostly wind. The red bricks of the Farmers Bank and Trust had faded to a pallid pink, held in place by desiccated, crumbling mortar. A ’32 Ford sedan idled in the bank’s alley, as dusty as the rest of the heaps parked in front of the bank. A humpbacked man as small as a child sat behind the wheel, smoking a ready-roll. Only a pro would have noticed the low chortle of the reground cam in his engine. Nothing moved down the street but a mismatched team of mules slowly pulling a wagon with a large Negro in overalls and a canvas-covered bed.

The heat-stunned silence was shattered by a single gunshot. Four armed men backed out of the bank, carrying a canvas laundry bag and pushing along an old lady in a feedsack dress and a young girl in white ruffles.

“And stay down, you damn hayseeds!” the red-headed one shouted. “We’ve got hostages!”

The group scrambled into the sedan, the last man firing a shot into the bank’s front window, then the car sped down the dusty street and around a corner after the wagon with its plodding mules. The crumbling sidewalk in front of the bank slowly filled with a group of confused customers and tellers huddled together like the survivors of a natural disaster. A red-faced man, holding a handkerchief against a bloody knot on his bald head, shoved through the crowd, and stared into the dust cloud into which the bank robbers had disappeared.

“One of you fools get that worthless old bastard out of my bank,” he ordered.

“I believe the sheriff’s a-dyin’,” one of the tellers ventured.

“Not in my bank, he isn’t,” the banker said. “We can’t afford to bury the idiot now.”

A frail old woman with a hooked nose said to no one in particular, “I believe Mr. Baines was sweet on that poor widow woman.”

“How the hell did they know to come today?” the banker muttered, his words lost on the gritty wind.

On the seventh day, Mabel had nearly slipped into an exhausted sleep when she heard the bluegum Geechi boy, Sledge, rack the slide on the sawed-off Ithaca 12-gauge pump. The hard sound slammed through the thin walls of the farmhouse. She knew what that meant. All too well. One of the gang in the nonstop poker game downstairs had pulled a gun. Probably the red-headed prick. Absolutely against all her rules. Mabel sighed, rolled over, and kissed Baby Emma’s rosebud lips. Even in her sleep, Baby Emma sucked on Mabel’s tongue briefly, then nipped it with her tiny white seed-corn teeth. Mabel wanted to follow the sleepy kiss — even cupped Em’s tiny, pert breasts with the rosehip nipples — but she had business to take care of. Baby Emma was twenty but easily passed for ten or eleven. The girl-child seemed built of warm and creamy vanilla scoops, and the blond ringlets curling in a tangle around her face looked like thick caramel drippings. Mabel touched her lips again, softly, not wanting to wake the young woman too quickly. Even smashed on sloe gin and laudanum, the girl’s breath reminded Mabel of the soda fountain in Ogallala where her goddammed father had been the local blue-faced, morphine-addicted pharmacist. The memory made what she had to do easier. She wished she could keep the kid out of it this time — Baby Em seemed to like it too much — and she hated to lose the gimp, but they all had to go. “Get ready, sugarplum,” she said, then slipped into her clothes piled on a ratty dresser.

The gang had been holed up in the sugarbeeter’s house since they had taken down the Farmer’s State Bank for almost sixteen thousand. That was the way she always worked. The smart ones didn’t run after a job. They holed up nearby for at least two weeks. That was always the hard part, that two weeks of waiting. The easy part was finding a failing farmer with no children and a defeated wife to take them in for a price. It was 1932, and almost anybody would do anything for a price. Of course, the final payment was always a .22 short in the eye and a sack of lime in the root cellar.

As Mabel considered how to deal with this new bunch, she knew she had plenty of time to change into her grandmother clothes. The boys always seemed more likely to obey her when she looked like an old woman rather than a lush ex-whore in her mid-thirties. She gathered her thick red hair into a knot, and stuffed it under a gray wig. She bound her slightly overripe body into an old woman’s girdle and a bra stuffed with sand-filled socks to make it seem as if her breasts drooped almost to her waist, all of it covered with a dress sewn from chickenfeed sacks. Her long, slim legs were sheathed in thick gray stockings, and her feet laced into ugly, thick-heeled granny shoes. In this outfit, she and Baby Em made the perfect hostages. Then Mabel added the last touches: a black straw brimless hat, ringed with cloth flowers, attached to the wig with three heavy hatpins, and a .22 Derringer up her sleeve.

Baby Em stripped butt-naked. Either she didn’t like blood on her nightclothes, or she liked the warm splatter on her pale, perfect skin.

The scene downstairs was much as Mabel had imagined. The farmer and his wife, as pale as bleached bones, huddled behind the icebox, shaking so badly that the water in the melt tray shimmered as if a cold breeze were sweeping across the worn plank floorboards. A handful of cards had been scattered across the kitchen table, and several stacks of chips tumbled into piles. The largest pile was in front of Fast Freddy Okrentski, the tiny, gimp-legged humpback, who had laid down a false trail for the police and dumped the car while the gang rode out of town in the back of the farmer’s wagon covered with a tarp.

The brothers, Crazy Al and Bruno Zale, the muscle, had small neat stacks of chips in front of them covered with their huge hands, hands so large they made their Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers look small. The brothers were large-jawed pug-uglies out of Nutley, New Jersey; men with the kinds of faces who, when they threatened death to the hostages, looked as if they might enjoy the feel of blood, bone chips, and brain matter dripping off their craggy smiles.

Carter Docktrey — the smooth-faced red-headed little shit from Terre Haute, who thought he led the gang, who thought he was God’s gift to women, and who thought he knew how to play poker — stood in front of his overturned chair, his chip stack flat and his military Colt .45 semiautomatic pointed at Lindsey. Mabel knew that Carter’s rod was mostly for show; the arrogant turd never cleaned the piece so it usually jammed after the first round.

She also knew that Lindsey, whose light blue eyes were as cool as ball bearings in a snowstorm and whose usually smooth forehead was wrinkled slightly, no more than a soft gust of wind across a still pond, was a stone killer. A single drop of sweat slipped off his bald head, over his furrowed brow, to land with a light click on his cards. His hands were under the table and more than likely had the .410 he carried strapped to his calf pointed at Carter. The little shotgun had been cut down to pistol size and loaded with tacks. To be gutshot that way ensured an endlessly painful death, so in a way she’d be doing Carter a favor. The slick little bastard hated Lindsey, who always cased and organized the jobs, because Lindsey was both smarter and calmer than Carter. So this was about them, and had little to do with Freddie the gimp, who probably was dealing seconds. He was as nimble with cards as he was with cars.

The scene was as still as a photograph. Of course, nobody had moved because Sledge stood in the corner, the Ithaca 12-gauge leveled at the table. At this range, a couple of rounds of the double-ought buckshot would have swept the room clean.

Mabel considered the scene, then, smiling, stepped behind Carter and picked up his chair. She grabbed his shoulders firmly and gently eased him into the chair. Then she took the pistol from his hand and set it in front of him.

“You’re not going to be needing this, honey,” she said softly, then turned to the bluegum and nodded.

Sledge returned the nod with a smile. He and Mabel had been a team since the cathouse in East Memphis where they worked had been burned down by a drunk Baptist preacher, and they went into the bank-robbing business. It had been good to them. Sledge had a small chicken farm outside Tacoma, and Mabel owned a roadhouse north of Bellingham where Canadian whiskey was easy to obtain.

Mabel turned back to Carter, rubbing his neck gently with her left hand, her right hand touching her hat. “Now what’s the problem, honey?”

“Goddamned Bohunk has been dealin’ seconds all night long,” Carter answered.

“I can’t believe that,” she said, still gentle, “can’t believe that any more than I can believe...” She paused, then her voice became hard. “... that you forgot what I said about no guns, you needle-dicked bug-fucking son of a bitch.”

Mabel had done it wrong a couple of times in the past and had to deal with convulsions, confusion, and anger — usually, with the Derringer — so experience had taught her exactly where to put the hatpin at the base of the skull. When she tapped the thick pin with the heel of her hand, it penetrated Carter’s dismal brain as easily as it might slip through a round of rat cheese. He was dead before his face hit the meager scattering of chips in front of him.

“I guess you boys will have to play four-handed, now,” she said lightly as she picked up Carter’s .45 off the table. “Unless you can get the farmer to change his overalls.”

Then Mabel lifted the pistol casually and shot Lindsey just where his forehead became his bald pate. He went over like an acrobat. Baby Em stepped around the corner with a nickle-plated .32, pressed it against Freddie’s temple, then pulled the trigger twice. She kept pulling the trigger as the gimp toppled sideways out of his chair. Crazy Al went for the piece under his jacket, but Sledge took him down with his first round at such close range that he blew Crazy Al’s gun hand off at the wrist and set fire to his dirty tie. Bruno started to raise his hands as if to plead, but Sledge shot him in the face before he could open his mouth.

The sugarbeeter and his wife were shaking and weeping so hard that they had trouble dragging the bodies down to the root cellar, but Mabel kept reassuring them that the lime would destroy the bodies and that with their cut of the bank loot they could start over again in California or Oregon. The tattered couple had stopped shaking by the time they finished dumping the last sack of lime, and the tears had dried from their eyes when Mabel put the two .22 shorts into their brainpans. The couple fell on the pile as neatly as if they had planned it that way.

Sledge finished setting up the house as the women dressed for traveling. He covered the bodies with Bell jars of coal oil and phosphorus, then arranged for a fire. He laid a slow black powder fuse from the root cellar to the kitchen table, where he wrapped it around the base of a three-day candle. Then he washed the Lincoln where the gimp had hidden it in the barn, changed the local plates for real New Jersey ones, and dressed in his driver’s uniform.

The guns and money were stashed in a false bottom of the trunk, an obscene amount of luggage piled on top and strapped to the back. The women were lodged in the back seat, draped in traveling dusters, big hats, and dust veils — a wealthy widow and her daughter on their way to the West Coast for a new life.

“Are we set, Mr. Sledge?” Mabel asked as he backed the large car out of the barn.

“Everything but the match, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, strike the match, please,” she said.

“I wish we were gonna be here to see it,” Baby Em said as Sledge headed for the farmhouse. “What’s gonna happen next, Momma?”

“There’s a plump little bank in Ogallala right next to the drugstore,” she answered. “I think we’ll pay it a little visit before we go home. I know a couple of old boys in Denver who might help.”

“Just no more little red-headed pricks, okay? I’d rather suck a cough drop,” Baby Em said as Sledge drove out onto the section road.

“Just a blue-faced monster,” Mabel said, “and he’ll have plenty of cough drops, and maybe even some hard rock candy. He used to have lots of hard rock candy.”

“I wanna gun in the bank next time,” Baby Em whined. “Don’t you?”

As the sun slipped toward the horizon, the wind paused for a moment, the dust settled, and a fire burned briefly in Mabel’s eyes, a fire as brief as her sad smile.

“We don’t need guns, Babydoll.”