Andrew Vachss: Two Trains Running

“Not without you,” Cynthia said, grimly.

Beaumont turned his iron eyes on his childhood friend. Luther’s beloved gray flannel suit was dark with blood; one arm dangled at his side, useless.

“Stay with her, Luther,” he ordered. “No matter what, understand?”

“Yes, Roy,” the slack-mouthed man said.

“Beau! Come on!” Cynthia pleaded.

“Get out!”

“No!” she cried.

“Yes, honey,” Beaumont said. He took a revolver from his desk drawer. “I love you, Cyn,” he said, stuck the pistol into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The wall behind him turned red.

Cynthia stumbled toward her fallen love.

“Roy said!” Luther yelled. He grabbed Cynthia by the hand and pulled her toward the escape door.

1959 October 11 Sunday 22:12

The field phone sounded in the warehouse.

“Team One,” the man behind the binoculars said.

“Subject RV fifty-six minutes. Behind the abandoned building at 303 Drexel. Copy?”

“Roger.”

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:06

“We’re not done,” Harley said. “Shalare knocked off the roof, but he can’t touch the foundation, like Roy always said.”

“What’s our move?” Sammy asked, his question passing the torch as no ceremony could have.

“For now, we stay low and we wait. We have to see if Shalare already got what he wants. If he just wanted Roy, because of that whole election thing, well, he got that. So he may lay back for a while. But it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow or ten years, he’ll never take what’s ours.”

“That Irish fuck should have finished us when he had the chance,” Udell swore. “Now he’s going to have to deal with some dangerous damn hillbillies.”

“Mountain men,” Harley told him, his voice pulsating with the strength of command. “We’re mountain men.”

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:08

“Sixty yards,” the spotter said, peering through his scope, then glancing at a photo in his right hand. “But that’s not our man.”

“It’s not time yet,” the sniper said, glancing at the luminous dial of his watch.

Mack Dressler came around the corner of the abandoned building, walking toward the figure waiting in the darkness.

“Yes?” the sniper said.

“Confirming… Yes.”

“There’s two, then.”

“We only got orders on-”

“The man said ‘RV,’ right? ‘Rendezvous,’ that’s a meet. More than one.”

As the shadows of the two figures merged, the sniper’s rifle cracked. Mack Dressler dropped. The other man immediately dove for cover, but a second shot caught him between the shoulder blades. Procter reached for his reporter’s pad, Have to write… headlining through his mind. Then the sniper’s next shot spiked his last story.

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:29

“Where are you going at this time of night, Carl?”

“I thought you were asleep, Mother.”

“I suppose I was,” she said from the darkness of her bedroom. “I can’t imagine what would have awakened me-you didn’t make a sound.”

“Go back to sleep, Mother.”

“But you haven’t told me where you’re-”

“I’m going to work,” Carl said. “There’s something I have to do.”

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:31

“This is our time,” Rufus said, urgently. “White men killing each other like it’s a war zone out there.”

“Our time to do what?” Darryl asked. “Lay in the cut?”

“No, brothers,” Rufus said, addressing everyone in the room. “Our time to cut the cord.”

“What’s that mean, Omar?”

“The guns, K-man,” Rufus said. “We got another shipment coming. The biggest one yet. Those crackers we’ve been buying from? They’re the only ones who can connect us to the guns we’ve been sending out to all the units.”

“Gonna kill white men, now’s the time,” Moses said, casting his vote. “Couple more bodies in this town won’t even be noticed, the way things been going.”

“That’s right,” Rufus said. “And I got just the man for the job. Don’t I, Silk?”

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:47

“It’s the Mercedes again,” the spotter said.

“Huh!” the rifleman answered. “You think the other one went in the back way, like before?”

“Let’s go see.”

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:48

“I did not order it,” Wainwright said into the phone. “I did not authorize it. I did not sanction it. I did not know about it.”

“Two men were hit,” a carefully calm voice said. “Do you think it’s possible the target was the other man, not ours?”

“It could be. The other man was one James Hammond Procter. He was a reporter for the local paper.”

“Procter? Do we have a file on him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“It’s possible that our man was meeting him for the purpose of… transmitting information.”

“But we don’t know this for sure?”

“No, sir. By the time we… The local police were on the scene very quickly. Whatever was on the person of either man is in their possession now.”

“Do we have someone we can speak to there?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Wainwright said.

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:51

Karl maneuvered his Mercedes behind the building, a flashlight extended in one gloved hand. There! He stopped the car, climbed out, and walked over to a padlocked back door. A thin slice of white showed between his lips. He prowled the back of the building with his flashlight until he found a window along the side.

Karl returned to his car, drove just beneath the window, then climbed lithely onto the roof of the Mercedes. The window glass yielded to his gloved fist.

Inside the building, Karl made his way to the front, found the pulley, and levered the garage door open. Moving quickly, he trotted around to the back, reclaimed his car, and drove it through the opening. Then he pulled the door closed behind him.

Breathing hard, Karl removed his topcoat. Underneath, he was clad in an immaculate brown uniform, with red epaulets and a red stripe down the pants. His jackboots were black mirrors. Around his waist was a heavy leather belt, connected to a matching shoulder strap worn across his chest. The uniform shirt had two armbands, red, with a black swastika in a white circle on each. Karl reached inside his Mercedes and withdrew a uniform cap and a cardboard folder.

He placed the cap on his head and checked his image in the mirror. The sight calmed him, regulating his breathing. He held out one tremorless hand. Hard and true.

Karl gently opened the folder and removed the contents. He carefully arranged the photographs and copies of official documents on the hood of his Mercedes, fussing until the proof, the indisputable proof, that his Führer was a half-Jewish, race-mixing fraud was perfectly aligned.

From the inside pocket of his uniform tunic, Karl took a single sheet of his personal stationery. The words “Blood and Honor” were written in a strong, assured hand.

Karl examined his display with a critical eye. Finally satisfied, he unsnapped the flap of his holster and took out a virginal black Luger.

1959 October 11 Sunday 23:58

“Hoffman’s not happy, Mickey,” the bulky man said.

“I know how to fix that, Sean.”

“Yes? Well, tell us, then.”

“It wasn’t Beaumont who took out Dioguardi,” Shalare said. “It was us, wasn’t it?”

“Aye,” the bulky man said. “That should mend our fences, right enough… if he buys it. But why did we do it, Mickey?”

“Beaumont was playing a double game,” Shalare said, speaking slowly, as if working out a complex problem. “Planning to cross us on the election. Remember, we had his own man, Lymon, working for us. And that part, we can prove. Lymon was an insider. He told us Beaumont was in cahoots with Dioguardi. They were going the other way. It was them or us.”