Ace Atkins - Infamous

Every story varied. The gunman was short. He was tall. He was dark. He was light. He wore a gray suit. He wore a blue suit. He was handsome. The man was ugly.

When bullets fly, the last thing a person does is study faces.

The hatband on Jones’s Stetson had grown wet.

He walked back into the relative coolness of the station, the place feeling even more like a cathedral. He sat down on a long, lone wooden bench. A wide swath of light fell from the windows, and he tilted his face into the sun, pulling off his glasses and cleaning them with a handkerchief.

It was then he noticed the blood and gray matter across the lapels of his jacket.

Old Sheriff Reed grabbing for that shotgun between his legs, weathered hands slipping while trying to take aim at the gunmen, instead blowing off half of Jelly Nash’s head. Jones knew he’d take that image to the grave and never tell a soul. He figured Lackey would do the same, knowing Reed worked better for the newsboys as a martyr and not an old lawman with shaky hands.

Jones thought back to a box canyon nearly twenty years ago just outside Pilares, where some greenhorn Rangers and a lone Customs agent had followed Mexican bandit Chico Cano as he drove a herd of stolen horses back to Mexico. The canyon had been nothing but a trap, and soon Jones’s friend and the young Rangers had been pinned down by at least thirty bandits, two Rangers escaping and making for a nearby ranch where they got word to Jones. By the time he found the men, they were all dead. Shot a hundred times, faces unrecognizable after being smashed with rocks. The bandits had shot their horses, too, and stolen their saddles and guns. Some political types in Austin blamed the men who escaped for not staying in the canyon and fighting to the death.

Jones would never forget loading up those boys on mule back, the heat more than a hundred, the bloated bodies already busted and the smell so awful that it caused one of the animals to vomit.

It took years. But Jones got the saddles and the guns back.

And Chico Cano’s head, too. A gift from Pancho Villa.

“Sir?”

Jones slipped the glasses back on his face, bringing Union Station back into focus. Another young agent handed him coffee and told him he’d drive whenever he was ready to head to the office. Jones thanked him and drank the coffee by himself in that long wash of light. He cleaned his glasses again and, when no one was looking, wiped the brains and blood from his jacket, tucked the handkerchief into his pocket, closed his eyes, and said a short prayer.

Then he stood, checked his weapon, and walked back to the Western Union office.

The next cable to Hoover read AGENTS CANNOT WORK ARMED WITH PEA-SHOOTERS. PLEASE ADVISE.

THE SONSABITCHES HAD LEFT HER CUTE LITTLE KITCHEN A goddamn mess. Kathryn was no nigger maid-Junie came on Wednesday-and she didn’t have time to be scraping out skillets and pouring suds into her big sink to clean up the piles of dishes laden with pancake syrup and cigarette ash. Coffee mugs that smelled like piney gin and sweet bourbon, open bottles of beer and busted poker chips. Son of a bitch. Kathryn walked over the black-and-white tile maze of the floor in her gingham housecoat, hair pulled into a tight knot behind her head, her arms elbow-deep into the bubbles, a cigarette hanging loose from her mouth.

The radio was tuned to WBAP, Jimmie Rodgers singing “Miss the Mississippi and You.” That yodeler was dead but still singing like the world was nothing but heartache and pain.

She poured in more suds and scrubbed another dish with a brush, rinsing with the clean water, drying with a damp towel, and placing it up on the rack. She grabbed a coffee cup that had been part of a set from her mama, Ora, and she gritted her teeth at the sight of a fat cigar ash in the bottom. George.

The back door to her little bungalow opened, and she smiled up at the face of old Albert Bates, the only friend of George Kelly’s that she could stand. He was nearly as tall as George, soft muscled, with a high forehead and gentle eyes. Bates was a good egg. A professional thief who was as honest as they come.

“Hey, doll,” Kathryn said.

“Jesus H.,” Albert said, kissing her on the cheek and setting a suit jacket across a chair. “I miss the party?”

He rolled up his sleeves and began to clear more dishes, whistling along with old Jimmie the brakeman’s yodels while Kathryn bopped her head in time.

“Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller stopped by last night.”

“They’re gone?” Albert asked, nudging Kathryn over with his butt and taking a spot in the suds, handing her the clean dish to rinse.

“I told George to get ’em gone.”

“Where to?” he asked.

“They showed George a map, easy-pickin’ banks.”

“No banks are easy pickin’ these days. Nothin’ to pick.”

He handed her a couple of her mother’s cups. Chipped china with delicate rose designs.

“I can’t stand either one of those bastards,” Kathryn said, rinsing and then drying. “Verne Miller gives me the creeps. Those eyes. Jesus.”

“Did George…”

“He’s not that stupid, thank God,” Kathryn said. “This is a two-man job.”

“And one woman.”

“And one woman.”

“Doesn’t come much better than Charles F. Urschel,” Albert Bates said. “Hey, can I have a smoke?”

Kathryn dried her hands and reached for her pack of Luckies, sticking one into Albert’s chiseled mug and lighting it with a kitchen match.

“Oil,” Bates said. “Those people shit money. How’d you find ’im?”

“Can you believe it was George’s idea?” she said. “He’s got a finger man in O.K. City who said this fat cat was ripe.”

“Just like we like ’em.”

“Al?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“You ever get a pain in your heart just ’cause you feel so damn regular and dull?”

“No one would ever call you dull, Kit.”

Kathryn smiled and pulled out another smoke. “It sure is good to have some sense in the house.”

“Me and George will plan this thing so tight, it’ll be-”

Kathryn mashed her index finger to Albert Bates’s lips and said: “Shush. Don’t be a dope and get all cocky.”

Charles F. Urschel found the cigar a little dry to his liking and squashed it out in an ashtray while Walter Jarrett dealt another rubber of bridge for the couples. Jarrett was just another oilman in Oklahoma City, someone Charlie knew casually from the club, but he’d seen fit to invite himself and his talkative wife over for a long evening. They’d already played too many rubbers, and despite Betty coming home at eleven-thirty as promised and kissing her mama on the cheek, they continued to stay on the sunporch and talk about government price schedules for low-grade gasoline, a shoe sale at Katz Department Store, and the new president’s radio address on Monday night. Charlie lit up another cigar, the same brand, but this one kept much better, and he said, “What the hell, one more rubber,” and the cards were all spread around and drinks refreshed. Mrs. Jarrett remarked how pretty young Betty looked in her summer dress, and Berenice was the one who said thank you, because, after all, Betty wasn’t Charlie’s daughter but Tom Slick’s, and as long as Charlie lived he damn well knew the differences between him and his old buddy and brother-in-law, who folks still called King of the Wildcatters.

“You must watch boys,” Mrs. Jarrett said. “You can’t trust boys. They are ruled by their thingamajigs.”

Charlie smiled over at Mr. Jarrett because it seemed to be the thing to do at the mention of peckers, and Jarrett grinned back before he leveled his eyes back at the cards. Jarrett was an uneasy card player who needed complete concentration, whereas Charlie could give the hand one glance, lean back, and enjoy his cigar while working out the basic math and guessing who had what and how they’d play ’em. Didn’t matter if you were playing with an oil executive or a driller in some rotten boomtown, people had their systems and rarely liked to break tradition.