Max Collins - Ask Not

“Your ride’s here, Mr. Heller,” intoned a mellow baritone, with just a tinge of Texas in it, and I turned to see Mac Wallace, his eyes half-lidded behind the heavy black-framed glasses, his smile more a smirk on his five-o’clock-shadow-smudgy face.

Then Ramon Rodriguez — one-half of the Chicago sniper team from last year, who I’d last seen almost running Sam and me down after that Beatles concert — sidled up beside me with a smile.

And a gun.

Muffled Dixieland from within the Sho-Bar provided background music as Wallace said softly, “Get in the backseat, Mr. Heller.” His smile was awful, the smile of a man just drunk enough to be dangerous. “This may be New Orleans, but we’re going to do this Chicago-style.”

Close to me, digging the snout of a revolver into my side, the Cuban said, “Take you for a ride, maricón. ”

Somebody was behind the wheel, but I couldn’t see him. I wondered for a moment if it was Ferrie — if so, I’d seriously misjudged him.

They looked like tourists, Wallace in a light-blue shirt jac, the Cuban in a straw fedora with a wide black band and a black-and-white geometric-pattern shirt, the driver in a tan-and-white plaid sport shirt. I was in a Crickteer suit, dark gray, not one of my tailored-for-shoulder-holster numbers.

Then the back door was opening and the nose of the gun in my side was nudging me, and if I cried out to the happy people on this noisy, neon-washed street, that gun would go off and I’d be the next dead witness. I had to let this play out.

I had to take the ride.

With the Cuban next to me in back, the driver glanced over his shoulder at us before pulling out into the slow, steady traffic of Bourbon Street. I realized he was no one I’d ever seen before, though he reminded me of somebody. He had a Gable-style mustache, and a hint of Latino in his heritage; but if I looked past that, he really, really reminded me of somebody.

Lee Harvey Oswald.

They cut over to Royal Street, just a block down from the raucous nightly party that was Bourbon Street, into an area where the ghosts of fashionable New Orleans of a century ago might be strolling right now, but hardly anybody else. On this sleeping street of closed curio and antiques shops, art galleries and fine restaurants, the Oswald look-alike pulled over and the Cuban dragged me out onto the sidewalk into the darkness under an overhanging balcony.

Wallace had gotten there ahead of us somehow, and was opening the trunk of the Galaxie — it was my rental, all right, lifted from the Roosevelt parking garage. My buddy Mac was tossing something in, something green and coiled like a snake, and a plump wad of cloth. Then he came over and grabbed me by an arm and yanked, and while I was off-balance, the Cuban swung the revolver, holding it by the barrel and cylinder I guess, because what caught the side of my head felt like the gun butt.

I went limp, though I wasn’t out — Rodriguez had seen too many episodes of Peter Gunn maybe, figuring all it took was a blow on the head to guarantee unconsciousness. Had his blow landed right, I’d more likely been dead, but really it glanced off, leaving a wet bloody gouge. I knew I was better off in that trunk than in the Galaxie’s backseat and I played like I really was knocked cold as Wallace dumped me in there and slammed the lid.

They hadn’t bothered to tie my hands — Royal wasn’t a busy street but it wasn’t deserted. So they’d moved fast, and now we were moving, not so fast. Closed inside that trunk, I got as comfortable as I could, which meant positioning myself on my side, playing fetus. Traffic and other city noise lasted maybe fifteen minutes, and when the sound of the wheels changed to something smooth and humming, I knew where we were — going over the Huey P. Long Bridge.

My old buddy the Kingfish had spent upwards of thirteen mil on the thing — two lanes of US 90 on either side of double railroad tracks — but Huey hadn’t lived to see it, missing by three months. From levee to levee, including railroad approaches, the monster was over four miles long. We were heading west into Jefferson Parish.

I had spent a lot of time in Louisiana on my two trips here in the ’30s, but that had been over twenty-five years ago. Still, I didn’t imagine much had changed. As we exited the bridge, with its notoriously tight lanes, we’d be heading into a landscape of dense swamps, oak-wooded lowlands, treacherous bayous, scattered settlements of poor whites and blacks, and an occasional modern sugar factory, as well as the ruins of old sugar refineries. The deeper into this territory we drove, the more chance I would become a heaping serving of Yankee Gumbo after all.

My fingers found what Wallace had tossed into the trunk ahead of me — a length of garden hose, about nine feet of the stuff, and a bath towel. I knew at once what they had in store for me. The hose, which was three-quarters of an inch in diameter, would easily run from the exhaust pipe of the Galaxie up to a slightly rolled-down window of the vehicle, where the towel could be stuffed to make a tighter seal, so the carbon monoxide could do its stuff. Looked like Mac Wallace figured I’d be getting despondent in this trunk and soon be ready to commit suicide, though my despondency would be strictly optional.

The car made a right turn onto a crunchy surface, a gravel or even more likely (considering where we were) crushed-shell road. The lane must have extended back under the bridge approach because I heard a rolling sound that might have been a car above me on cement. We went perhaps a mile farther and the car swung over a little and came to an abrupt stop, though the driver did not kill the engine. Car doors opened and closed.

When the trunk lid lifted, the Cuban in the straw fedora was smiling down at me and, with the nine millimeter tight in my hand — the one I’d tucked away behind the spare tire being unlicensed to carry in Louisiana — I fired three rounds into his face and each one found something to do, this one punching out an eye, that one dimpling his forehead, another shattering that smile like a brick through a window. He fell away fedora and all and I leapt out like a demented jack-in-the-box, and I could see Wallace, parked down a ways to the right on the other side of the road, leaning against the car he’d followed us here in, its motor running, his mouth hanging open with a cigarette in it so freshly lit he hadn’t waved the match out yet.

But I could also see the Oswald look-alike on my right, too, but much closer, going for a gun in his waistband, and I gave him two rounds in the head, taking his skull apart and spraying brains and blood and bone into the night, his head going back just like physics had demanded of Jack Kennedy, and he did a backward pratfall, landing half on the crushed-shell road, half on the shoulder, in memory of Rose Cheramie.

I spun, with eight rounds left in the mag for Wallace and happy to give him every one, but he was already behind the wheel of his car, a red Chevy Corvair, which he swung around, tires stirring shells, the vehicle’s nose toward me, rumbling right at me, headlights blinding, and I dove out of the way as he picked up speed, heading back toward the highway, spitting crushed shells, fishtailing.

With the Galaxie’s engine still running (they’d hot-wired it), I was able to take off right after him, blinking away the half-blindness those headlights had caused. He didn’t have much of a head start.

I tossed the nine millimeter temporarily on the rider’s seat, steered with my left hand as I reached across to roll down the window with my right, then passed the nine millimeter to myself, from my right hand to my left, and half-leaned out of the vehicle Wild West — style as I ripped a shot off into the night. The sound was thunderous, echoing off the nearby river, filling the dark cathedral of the outdoors with reverberations.