Ace Atkins - Infamous

“Could you even sneak a peak? Of something? Anything?”

“A few days after they took me, I got the bandages loose. I was able to peer around a bit. They kept me in a shack, like I said. The outhouse was nearby.”

“Hold on,” Jones said. He sat at Urschel’s desk and pulled a small notebook from his satchel. “How many rooms in this shack?”

“Three?”

“Which way did the boards run in the house?”

“The boards?”

“Floorboards.”

“Judging on the heat from the sun,” Urschel said. “East and west.”

Jones nodded. “What about the outhouse? Which direction?”

“West,” Urschel said. “I’m sure of it. But, sir, I really don’t see the point in…”

Jones kept the pipe in his teeth and held up his left hand as he sketched a bit, adding the three rooms to a modest shack, an outhouse, the road Urschel had mentioned last night. That old well where they drew the mineral water. “Did you see animals?”

“Heard them,” Urschel said. “Pigs, chickens. The old man and the boy spoke of a prize white-faced bull, and I saw the animal’s face when I ran. It was about all I saw when I was running.”

“Sun blind?” Jones asked.

Urschel nodded. “I think I lost control of my mind a bit, too.”

“Happens with heat.”

“The boy spoke of a woman of loose character who lived nearby,” Urschel said. “He joked about it often.”

“What did he say?”

“Only that there was a teenage whore in the vicinity. I guess she only charged a quarter for intercourse.”

Jones nodded. He sketched some more, adding arrows and asking a bit more about where Urschel had heard the farm animals. The man had forgotten about an old cornfield and something he’d heard about a melon patch with fruit just turning ripe. Jones asked about the direction cars arrived from and how they departed, and then he came all the way back around and asked more about the storm and how long it lasted and what he did during the rains.

“I know the rain started before five-thirty.”

“And how’s that?”

“Well, at five-thirty is when the airplane would pass.”

“The airplane.”

“Yes, sir,” Urschel said. “I really must be going, Mr. Jones. Might we-”

“Tell me more about the aircraft.”

“An airplane would pass every day at nine in the morning and again about five-thirty,” he said. “I’d ask the boy for the time several minutes after the plane sounded so he wouldn’t get suspicious. But I didn’t think much of it. Planes fly all over this nation these days.”

“What about the rain?”

Urschel looked at him and crossed his legs. His face looked drawn, his dark eyes hollow and void.

“Did that second plane fly the day of the storms?”

Urschel looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his jaw. He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No, sir. I didn’t hear that plane.”

Jones nodded.

“Is that of importance?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Jones said, puffing on the pipe. “It most surely is.”

They arrived in Saint Paul a little before nightfall. Kathryn knew the town, had lived there for a couple of frigid years in a crummy apartment with George, a real honeymoon special, with a Murphy bed and pullout ironing board, him talking her into that frozen wasteland because of his connection with Harvey Bailey, Verne Miller, and the dear departed Jelly Nash. Said they owed him, and that Saint Paul was a wide-open town, the kind of city where those goddamn yeggs could live without ever having to look over their backs. You paid off the detectives, the chief of police, and you were polished gold. Kathryn had liked Saint Paul okay right when George had first gotten out of Leavenworth, and she’d been dazzled a bit with those first few bank jobs-although now, thinking back, they didn’t make them rich-and how the big mug would take her out shopping on Main and to R. H. Bockstruck for some baubles and jewels. There were nights at the Parisian, where they had a dance floor as big as two football gridirons, and summers at Harry Sawyer’s place out on the lake, skinny-dipping under the moon. The blind pigs and speakeasies were on every city block and in basements, and when George would go down for a meet at the Green Lantern he’d bring her with him, decked out finer and more beautiful than any of those whores of Bailey’s or Nash’s. About the only one that could come close in looks was Vi Mathias, but Verne had put her on the run, and she wouldn’t be in Saint Paul. And maybe since Prohibition was long, dumb history, the whiskey and gin wouldn’t taste so damn good as when you knew you were doing something bad and wrong.

Sometimes those were the only things that felt like doing.

“You think he’s even here?” she asked.

“It’s his place.”

“It was his place,” Kathryn said, whispering. “It’s been a few years.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Did you ever meet the Kid?”

“Yeah, I met him.”

“Does he know you?”

“I said I met him.”

“Doesn’t mean he knows you,” she said. “You weren’t that known when we were up here. You were just the driver. I don’t think you made the papers once.”

George placed his big knuckles on the long glass cigar case and gave a low whistle. He called the tobacco shop steward over for a couple of these and a couple of those, and for that big solid-gold lighter, wondering if he could have it engraved.

“Are you even listening to me?”

The cigar steward grabbed what George pointed out and strolled back to the cash register and out of earshot. Toward the front of the cigar shop was a big, tall wooden Indian, standing dumb and silent and proud.

“You were the one who wanted to cut out the middlemen, so here we are. But now you want to doubt me and the plan, and now I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a smart idea. Do you have any idea how mad Verne and Harv are going to be when they learn we went to the Kid direct?”

“I just don’t see the logic in cutting those two fools in when they didn’t lift a finger.”

George shrugged and didn’t disagree. He walked over to the front counter-long stained wood and wavy glass-filled with hundreds and hundreds of cigars wrapped in rich, aged tobacco. The whole store smelled like the inside of an old cedar chest. Every few moments the bell above the door would jingle and in would walk a couple fellas, or a lone fella, and they’d nod to the steward and head back behind a curtain at the rear of the store. George plugged a cigar into the side of his mouth and thumbed his new lighter, having paid a big wad of cash for it. He smiled as he got the thing going, and told her to find a nice, comfortable chair and read the paper or something, he’d be right back.

And as much as it burned her up, she knew she couldn’t go behind the curtain, back to the cigar shop’s private club, where only dirty egg-sucking politicians, moneygrubbing bankers, and two-timing yeggs were allowed. All of ’em men, with their eye candy left on the settee to read the Saint Paul Star about the latest exploits of the Barker Gang and the Barrow Brothers, thousands of Joes showing up at a new agency for home loans, and about those big stores in Bay City, Michigan, being pummeled with stones for not jibing with the NRA work hours. Ain’t that a hoot. And there was Charles Urschel again, the sheriff in Oklahoma City criticizing the poor bastard for not running to a telephone when George released him. If Urschel had called me instead of a taxi when he was turned loose, the kidnappers wouldn’t have had a chance in a hundred to get away. It was raining so hard that only two roads away from Norman were passable, and he would’ve found them in less than ten minutes… She scanned the rest, but then her eyes caught the headline: TWO MILLION FOR CLARK GABLE. She passed on over Urschel and some bullshit about the police finding the shack where they’d hid out.