Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

There were ten cases of the stuff. A hundred and twenty quarts of raw, unlabelled, untaxed white lightning. Not expecting so large an operation, Dickie was surprised. That eight, ten grand Rose talked about was seeming more credible all the time. He worked hard at helping to transfer the load, not talking, not looking at Luke, feeling within himself a growing tenseness that was part excitement and part something he couldn’t define.

After the load was transferred, Luke said, “Rose’ll have victuals on the table,” and went off across the yard to the house. Accepting the terse statement as an invitation, Dickie followed.

The three of them sat at the table in yellow light and ate in silence. After they were finished, Luke went into the bedroom and lay down in his clothes. Dickie and Rose heard the sharp screech of old springs under his weight, and they sat looking at each other across the kitchen table with the imminent, precarious future a dark bond between them. Then Dickie shrugged and grinned and went out onto the porch, banging the screen. Sitting there on the steps, he listened to the sounds of Rose moving around behind him, scraping up the dishes.

It was funny how things happened, he thought. Couple days ago he’d been a guy with a debt and a deadly creditor. A guy from KC with a poor prognosis. Now, just like nothing, he had a cute country doll and prospects. Now, by all that was cockeyed, he stood to lift a fat bundle from a hillbilly bootlegger. He grinned in the darkness and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.

Rose came to the screen door several times, but she didn’t come out or speak. He could feel her there, charged and tense, though she was silent. It was about nine-thirty when he heard Luke’s big clod-hoppers pound slowly across the kitchen floor, heard the screen door bang.

Looking up, he felt something inside him go shriveled and cold in a sudden painful contraction. Luke stood there at the edge of the porch with the yellow light of the kitchen washing his back and edging around onto the long, hard planes of his face. In his hand he held the old .45 Colt revolver. Dickie had seen plenty of guns, but he’d never seen one that looked quite so wicked as this.

“You sleep in my barn and eat my victuals,” Luke said. “I guess it’s only right you do a little work. You better come along and help me unload.”

There was a contingency Dickie hadn’t anticipated. Joke, he thought desperately. Just treat it like a very unfunny joke. He managed a laugh, forcing it through stiff lips.

“I don’t think I’d be much help,” he said. “I’m sleepy as a dog. Just thinking about crawling into the hay in the loft.”

Luke was just holding the .45 casually, but somehow it got twisted around so that the mouth was yawning right in Dickie’s face.

“I reckon you better come,” Luke said.

Under that .45 caliber threat, Dickie stood up with a gaseous sensation of lightness, hysteria clouding his brain, urging him to the insanity of flight. He fought for control, crossing the yard ahead of Luke with reluctant steps, and through the cloud over his brain there penetrated in a thin whisper the words that Rose had spoken in the loft that morning: ... he’ll never let himself be taken alive. And he seemed to see with sudden clarity, as if his vision had achieved ascendancy over distance and night, a dark car in ambush en a dark road. Getting into the truck, he looked back toward the house and saw Rose standing frozen and immobile in the yellow rectangle of the kitchen door. Her terror reached out to him across the yard.

Slumped in the seat, he tried with desperate urgency to figure a way out. The old truck rattled and popped, fighting the hills. After a short drive, Luke wheeled it south onto a road that was a little wider, a little better graded. He handled the wheel in dour silence, the .45 rammed casually under the belt of his jeans.

“How far is it?” Dickie asked.

It hurt him to talk, the pain as actual as if he had tonsillitis. Beside him, Luke grunted.

“Up the road a piece. Not far.”

They climbed a hill, rattled down into a hollow, climbed again. They crossed the crest, and the road dropped away, the truck plunging down with a fusillade of exhaust explosions.

Then, down in the hollow, the glaring spot leaped up, sweeping the truck. In the light, barely discernible, stood a man with a rifle in his hands. Luke cursed viciously, jamming brakes, and Dickie, acting at last under the grim compulsion of his last chance, tore at the door handle beside him and dove out sprawling onto the rocky road. Clawing, scrambling for the ditch in the blinding bath of light, he was aware of a confusion of sounds, shouts and explosions in a discord of violence. Something struck his shoulder, a dull impact, prompting the crazy thought that someone had hit him with a rock. He was slammed over into the ditch, rolling, and he was amazed at the force of so slight a blow.

On the road, stark in the merciless light, a guy who had everything to lose however he played it, Luke stood spraddle-legged and emptied the old Colt of its six bullets. He did it very deliberately, with spaced timing of crashing detonations, as if he were counting a long second between every pull on the trigger. When the chamber had revolved to a dead shell, he let the gun drop to the road, and stood for a moment looking down at it. Then his long body folded in the middle, and went over gently onto his head and shoulders, spinning off into his back with a violent spasm of released muscles.

At that moment, Dickie was up and running. He ran blindly, relying on a sort of desperate instinct to get him back to the farm where Rose was waiting. The anesthetic of shock was gone from his smashed shoulder, and the pain was now there, growing steadily greater, eating its way like a slow fire into the rest of his body. He held the shoulder crumpled forward, the forearm below it clamped tight across his stomach.

Staying away from the road, cursing and sobbing in a waste of precious breath, he ran and fell and scrambled up to keep running, and after an eternity, by a great miracle, he climbed to the farm and stood swaying in the kitchen, looking at Rose in a swirling red fog.

“God,” she said. “Oh, God.”

He sat down very carefully in a chair at the table and let his head fall forward onto his good arm.

He began to cry again, sobs of pain and exhaustion, the crying of a stricken child. At last he raised his head and formed whispered words.

“Luke’s dead,” he said. “He was just like you said. Like a crazy man.”

She didn’t answer, and he saw then that her eyes were not on his face, where they should have been, but rather lower on his body. He looked down and saw that his entire shirt front was soaked with blood. The fear in him was like a swelling icy wind as he became aware for the first time that he might really die.

“The blood,” he whispered. “Stop the blood.”

Apparently she didn’t hear. Her eyes raised slowly, and the red fog at that moment seemed to drift out of his vision, so that he could see the eyes clearly — the compassionless calculation in them, the cold consideration of personal advantage. The advantage of the green cache unsplit.

He was filled, suddenly, with an intense, wild pity for himself. Strangely, on the edge of death, he was homesick.

And it was a long, long way to Kansas City. A way that grew longer by the second, stretching toward infinity.

Originally published in Manhunt , Feb. 1954.

About a week before the date of his fight with Emmet Darcy, Jackie Brand went home one evening to find his wife Peg at the kitchen table with a pencil in her hand and a big sheet of paper covered with figures in front of her. Peg was a little gal, maybe five-one in heels and about ninety pounds sopping wet, but every inch and every pound collaborated to produce a quality product. Her hair was pale gold, almost white, and it had the same soft glow that got into her eyes when she was excited about something.