Макс Коллинз - Road to Perdition

Michael, waking up in the backseat, popped his head up, saying, “What? Why? What’s goin’—”

And his father reached back and physically shoved him down as the rear window exploded.

Behind them, pleased at the sound of the shattered glass, Maguire fired again, this time with no success.

“Damnit,” he said, standing in the road.

The cop, having heard the shot, came running out, one hand unbuttoning a holstered sidearm. “ Hey! What the hell you think you’re—”

Maguire turned and shot him in the head.

Blood mist blossomed in the night, as the dead cop tumbled onto his back. With a sigh, disappointed but willing to salvage the evening, Maguire and his gun and his camera headed back into the diner, to finish up.

O’Sullivan drove the speed limit, relieved that no headlights were coming up behind him, grateful for the dark night and the empty highway. He was heading up Highway 13, back toward where they’d come, the turn-off to the Perdition road no longer an option.

In his cap and heavy winter coat, pushed down by his papa, Michael hadn’t been hurt by the flying glass — neither had O’Sullivan — and shards lay in the backseat like scattered ice.

Questions were tumbling out of a frightened Michael. “What happened back there? Who shot at us?”

O’Sullivan answered, watching the boy in the rearview mirror. “A man in the diner was sent to kill us.”

“How did you know he was? Did he point a gun... ?”

“No. I saw him and knew, that’s all.”

“But, Papa — how could you know?”

Now he turned and looked back at his son and told him — flat-out told him: “Because, Michael — I used to have his job!”

O’Sullivan took a side road. A few miles later, he drove up into the entry of an open field and after perhaps half a mile stopped the car, cutting the lights. The man with the camera would not find them here.

Out of breath, he turned to his son, who was wide-eyed and also breathing hard. Fury rose in O’Sullivan like lava, erupting: “When I tell you to do something, goddamn do it!”

“Papa... ”

“When I say get down, you get down. You don’t ask questions. There’s no time for questions. You can die in the time it takes to ask a goddamn question!”

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t listen . From now on, if I say we’re stopping to eat, you stay with me! At my side. You will listen to what I say and do as I say, or you can get the hell out of this car and take care of yourself.”

The boy’s eyes were huge. “What?”

“Make up your mind, Michael. I can’t fight them and you. Not at the same time.”

And now the boy got mad, shouting defensively, “I can take care of myself just fine! You never wanted me along, anyway! You blame me for this — you think it’s all my fault!”

“Stop it, Michael... stop that talk.”

“He meant to kill me and Peter died instead and—”

“It was not your fault! The fault lies with the betrayers — Looney and his son. Listen to me — listen! You are not responsible for the deaths of your brother and your mother... and neither am I. But I am responsible for their retribution.”

The boy seemed to understand; but he still sounded angry when he said, “Just take me to Aunt Sarah’s.”

“I can’t.”

“... What?”

“Not now.”

“But... why?”

He answered the boy’s question with one of his own: “How did that man find us tonight?”

“I don’t know — how did he? How could he?”

O’Sullivan shook his head. “There’s only one way, son — he knew where we were heading.”

“So I can’t go stay with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bob.”

“Someday, maybe we both can.”

He could tell this terrible turn was, to his son, good news.

Trying not to smile, the boy said, “So... what are we going to do, now?”

O’Sullivan sighed. “Get in front.”

“Okay,” Michael said, and scrambled up next to his father.

O’Sullivan touched his son’s arm. “I’ve been thinking about doing something... but I couldn’t figure out a way to do it alone. With you helping, I can make it work. But it’s dangerous.”

Michael shrugged. “I don’t care. I just want to be with you. I just want to help.”

He held his son’s eyes with his. “Then you need to listen to me... all right? You can’t be a little boy — you have to be the man helping me. Or we’ll both be dead.”

Michael nodded.

“This is what we have to do,” O’Sullivan said. “We have to convince the Chicago gangsters to give us Connor Looney.”

“How can you make them do that?”

“‘We,’ son... ‘we.’ Now, these men in Chicago, they talk about loyalty and honor and family, but what they really care about is money.”

“Root of all evil, Bible says.”

“The Bible’s right. These big men, Capone and Nitti, they keep their money in little banks all over the Midwest. It’s sort of... spread around, for safety sake.”

“What banks, Papa?”

“They’re the same ones your godfather John Looney uses, for the same purpose... hiding money from the government, for tax reasons. I know where these banks are, son.”

The boy was shaking his head — grasping some of it, but not all of it. “But Papa, they won’t just give you the money.”

“That’s right, son — we have to take it.”

Michael’s eyes got big again. “Like robbers? Like Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson?”

O’Sullivan frowned. “How do you know those names?”

“From the newsreels at the moving pictures.”

“... Think of it more like Robin Hood. Are you going to help me, son? Can you do this?”

This time the boy answered with a question: “Do you think I can?”

“Yes.”

Michael smiled — eager. “When do we start?”

“Not until I teach you something.”

“What?”

“How to be a wheelman.”

“What’s a wheelman?”

“First thing tomorrow, after breakfast... you’ll see.”

For my father and me, the road to Perdition, Kansas, was ever-winding, and (or so it seemed to me then) never-ending. We could have been to the farm by the lake a thousand times in those long months. We traversed the same midwestern states often enough — dirt roads, gravel roads, occasionally concrete, ever traveling, ever nearing, never arriving .

When my father would call my uncle in Perdition, the answer would always be the same: crows on the fence. Looney (or were they Capone?) men were posted on the road outside the farm, “sittin’ out in front of the place in broad daylight,” Uncle Bob would say. And another group of Capone (or were they Looney?) men had a room over the hardware store, in the little downtown of Perdition itself. Two sets of four, at the house, downtown, watching in shifts...

And of course my father wouldn’t allow my uncle and aunt to bring in the sheriff, and Papa’s “no” was emphatic when Uncle Bob suggested, “Should I take my own shotgun, and pay ’em a visit?”

So, in a way, the real start of our journey began the morning after that man with the camera tried to kill us at the diner .

And on that morning — when I had my first lesson as my father’s underage wheelman — I accomplished something that all of Capone’s thugs (and Looney’s too) never could: I frightened my father. Not that my father was immune to fear, and I don’t mean to suggest that the various scrapes and shoot-outs with gangsters and assassins didn’t affect him .

But no gangster, however hardboiled, however ruthless, managed to do what I did — turn my father’s face as white as a sheet, as white as a ghost, as white as that priest stepping out of his confessional .