Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“Ever think about getting out of it?” Floyd asked.

“Out of what?”

He smiled; cheeks seemed about to burst, and they were a burning red. “This life of crime, friend. This ol’ life of crime.” He looked out toward the trees across the river. “Wouldn’t you like to cross over there, and just be done with it?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“You probably better off with those Chicago Boys.” He said “Boys” like “bow-ahs.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’s business men.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

He grunted a laugh. “We’s small fry. Kind gets gobbled up by the bigger fish.”

I knew what he meant. There would always be room for the Capones and the Nittis; like Karpis said, the Syndicate was in “public-service-type business.” The outlaws were a dying breed. And some of them seemed to know it.

“Take this ‘Pretty Boy’ shit. And ‘Baby Face.’ Those ain’t names nobody who knows us calls us. That’s newspaper shit. Only I don’t think it starts with the newspapers.”

“You don’t?”

“I think it’s Cummings and Hoover trying to make saps out of us.”

Cummings was the U.S. attorney general, the man who was spearheading FDR’s war on crime.

“Why?” I said.

“Why? They make us sound like mad dogs so they look like big heroes when they catch us.”

“They haven’t caught you yet.”

He shook his head. “Matter of time. Matter of time.”

“My experience with the feds is they’re pretty goddamn lame.”

Floyd nodded, chewing on the weed. “But they’s so many of ’em.”

“Yeah. And they got guns now. They can cross state lines, and they got guns now.”

“I got so little to show.”

“Huh?”

“I been at this since I was in my twenties. Just a kid. And I got so little stored away. This life is expensive, you know.”

“They say you gave a lot of your money away.”

He smiled, almost shyly this time. “I did some of that. I ain’t no Robin Hood, like some’d have you think. Took care of my friends, in the hills, is all. And they took care of me. And mine.”

He sat and stared at the river.

Then he said, “I got a boy, nine. Just a tad older than that boy of Ben’s. And I got a pretty wife.” He chewed the end of the weed; then turned eagerly and said, “Want to see?”

“Sure.”

Grinning, he dug his wallet out of his back pocket. He showed me a snapshot of his wife — a lovely dark-haired woman in a white dress and hat; standing near her, putting a supportive arm around her, was a beaming kid in a white shirt and slacks.

“Good-looking kid,” I said. “Honey of a wife, too.”

He smiled, looking at the picture; after a while the smile faded, but he kept looking.

Then he put it away in the wallet; stuffed the wallet in his pocket.

I said, “They were dressed nice — look healthy, well-fed.”

Floyd nodded. “I been providin’ for ’em. But in the long run, what? This life can’t last. I’m gettin’ too old for it. And the times is passin’ me by. It’s time to get across the river.”

I didn’t follow him. I said so.

He smiled. “Sometimes you got to do something that common sense says not.”

“Like what?”

“Like a impossible job. Like a score so big, you can make a new life.”

My mouth felt dry.

I said, “Is that the kind of job going down tomorrow?”

He nodded — just the trace of a smile on the cupid lips.

I said, “All I know is it’s a kidnapping.”

“Did you know it’s a big shot? A national figger, like the damn papers put it?”

I felt something cold at the base of my spine.

“No,” I said.

“Well, it is, Jim.” He rose.

He began to walk up the slope.

I followed.

“Who?” I asked.

“How much did they say you’d be getting?”

“My cut? Something like five gees.”

“It’ll be more. I promise you that.”

We were through the trees, now.

“Who, Chock?”

“I don’t want to tell you, unless I know you’re in. In all the way. In for sure.”

“I’m in. Who?”

“One of them that’s out to end us.”

“Who.”

“Not ‘who.’ Hoover. John Edgar Hoover. Attorney general’s right-hand man. Better hurry, Jim — it’s gettin’ time for Ma’s barbecue...”

Shortly after Floyd and I came back around the front of the tourist camp, a Ford sedan pulled in, driven by Doc Barker. Karpis rode in front with him, and Dolores and Louise were in back. The guy in the Panama hat, Ben, fetched their cabin keys. Louise saw me through her window, beamed and climbed out of the sedan and all but ran to my side. I’d known her less than twenty-four hours and there she was, clinging to my arm like life was a sinking ship and I was a piece of floating wood.

I walked her down to the room, carrying her bag.

“Twin beds,” she said. “Too bad.”

“Louise,” I said. “I’m not so sure what happened this morning is something we ought to repeat...”

She pretended to be hurt by that; the wide-set brown eyes looked comically woeful. God, she looked cute — the bobbed blond hair, the rosy cheeks, pouty lips, slight but rounded figure well displayed in a form-fitting pink-and-white-print cotton dress with a shoelace bow at the neck. She sat on the edge of one of the beds and hiked her skirt up to where the milk of her thighs said hello above her rolled stocking tops.

“You’re too much of a gentleman sometimes, Jimmy — don’t you think?”

Then there I was with my pants down around my legs and her skirt up and I never said I was perfect, did I?

She went into the bathroom for a while, came out looking fresh and sparkly, and we lay together, clothes more or less buttoned up and back in place, and she had a smoke. I hadn’t seen her smoke before.

“You want a drag?” she asked, offering the ciggie.

“No thanks. Never picked up the habit.”

“My daddy’d whip me sure, if he saw these lips touching tobacco. Candy got me started.”

She spoke Candy’s name with a sense of history; he’d retreated into the past. Dead a day.

It wasn’t that she was cold, or heartless; she was a warm little thing, in about every way you could imagine. She’d just learned the facts of life on the outlaw road.

She said, “Should be suppertime soon, shouldn’t it?”

“Real soon. Ma’s cooking out back.”

“She’s a good cook.” Puffed the cig. “This is a nice room.”

“No outhouse tonight.”

“Yeah, and a bath and everything. That’s ugly wallpaper, though. Is that purple or brown or what? It makes the room seem small — why would they pick something so dark?”

“To keep us from noticing the cockroaches.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. She didn’t seem to be inhaling her smoke.

Bedsprings making their unmistakable music came through the thin wall.

She giggled. “Somebody else is being naughty.”

“Who’s next door?”

“I think it’s the Nelsons.”

“Well, then they’re not being naughty. They’re married, so it’s okay with God and everybody.”

She nodded; she had a disconcerting way of taking my wisecracks at face value.

From next door, a woman’s voice said, “Less... less... oh, less!”

I said, “Doesn’t she mean ‘more’?”

“She’s saying Les — the name, Les. Short for Lester? That’s Nelson’s real name. Lester Gillis.”

That was news to me.