Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“You sure you want to dig into family secrets? Some things are best left underground. I could tell you a thing or two about Sam Vincent that would surprise you and that, even now that I have made peace with them, I wish I hadn’t learned.”

“I have had the same thoughts myself and it does scare me. But now I’m hooked. Charles invented Earl, Earl invented Bob. To understand Earl, I’ve got to work that line backwards in time. I have to answer the one question Charles didn’t want asked: who was Charles F. Swagger?”

LITTLE BOHEMIA LODGE

MANITOWISH WATERS, WISCONSIN

April 22, 1934

Les ran through the woods blindly. He was not one to panic, but hearing what sounded like gunfire, he’d looked out the window of the cabin and suddenly the tree line had erupted in machine-gun fire, and even if he wasn’t in its direct line, from the number of guns he knew the federals were here in force.

His first thought, Where was Helen? while the gunfire rose and rose, as if a whole battalion was on the attack. Then he realized she was in the main lodge with Tommy and Johnny and Homer and the boys, and there was nothing he could do except escape and survive and pray for the same outcome for her.

He had his .45 tucked in his shoulder holster, because he always did; he lived with that gun, trusted it, and kept it close for just this occasion. But from the sounds outside, he knew he needed more, and he opened the closet and there his Thompson gun leaned against the wall, as casually as if it were a golf club or something, with its bulbous and awkward drum of fifty rounds giving it weight and clumsiness. His enthusiasm for firearms filled him with energy, and the prospect of using one against human targets always made him happy — that is, if he weren’t boiling with rage, which was his other mode of being. He was a contradiction, and no one could explain him, a handsome, dapper fellow, capable, a family man, the proud father of Ronald and Darlene, the loyal husband to one wife (he never messed around, and he never left Helen for long periods of time), and, to see him, you’d think he was one of life’s little mechanics, solid, a churchgoer. But he did like to shoot things up, he liked adventure, he had an abnormal absence of fear, and killing wasn’t a thing that lingered in his mind for long.

He grabbed the weapon, feeling its heaviness, which, far from being an irritation, was an attribute that helped keep it steady when fired at the quick march. He called it a machino, and it was one of the reasons he had entered this line of work, for the thrill it gave him when unleashed righteously against those who would do him harm was beyond ecstasy. And such a moment was now upon him, happily, like the reward of a drug rush to addict. Machino held all the answers, was a god that paid for fealty with victory. It pushed out all doubts and fears. He was happy, happy, happy.

He stepped out the front door of the cabin and found himself at an angle to the tree line, whose concealed gunners continued to lay their fusillade against the large log structure fifty yards immediately to their front, which itself was now adrift in smoke and vapor from all the bullet strikes and the dust they ripped free as they buried themselves in wood or plaster.

He was not stupid, and he was not without aesthetic impulse. At this moment, he took in the dramatic spectacle of what lay before him and knew that this was where he belonged, amid the smell of burned powder and the hammering of the guns, illuminated by flashes dancing out of muzzles, the whole thing livid and clear in the coldness of an early-spring evening in the northern latitudes. It didn’t get much better.

He oriented the gun easily, and his finger went fast to the trigger, knowing that, against the chance of visitors, he kept the bolt cocked and the safety lever down, because if you needed it, the chances were you needed it that second. It seemed to melt into his body, so brilliantly engineered was it, and he hunched, braced, smiled, and fired.

Machino spoke. It lay a long strip of .45s against the tree line, and though he did not see the bullets strike, he saw dust kick, branches shudder, leaves disintegrate, trees vibrate, under the wondrous power of machino. The drama of the gun at full blast offered other pleasures too, the spray of spent shells ejecting like kernels of popped corn from the skillet, the building shudder of the vibration, the superspeed blur of the bolt as it rammed forward and back under the power of the firing cartridges, the flame squirting upward, almost over the gun, as the configuration of the gun’s compensated nozzle aimed it upward in order to hold the muzzle down by counterforce, the glint of the fins on the barrel, the solidity of each grip in his strong, tight hands. So much to enjoy, such pleasures to behold! It filled his anarchistic heart with joy. Some men are born to destroy, and nothing satisfies them but that. Whatever you’ve got, they want to tear it apart, from architecture and bank vaults to order and society itself, anything, just to watch it twist, shred, and die.

Then the gun ran dry. He’d dumped the whole drum in a few seconds, sending fifty half-inch death warrants out into the night, and tough luck for anyone who got served by them. This, however, issued a problem, which was, where was another drum? And, second, how quickly could he get it in? For the drums, with all that ammo, were so heavy, the engineers had come up with a sliding rather than a clicking mechanism by which to attach them to gun, and slipping the lips of the drum into the slots that were milled into the frame was never easy. But even as he identified the problem, he solved it. He had another weapon, so unique it seemed to have been just planned for this situation.

Thus, he dashed back in the cabin while the federal gunners ducked, pulled back, tried to gauge this new stream of incoming fire, and he picked up something as yet unseen in the world. It was built for him — he had several and had even given one to Johnny as a gift, as an acolyte gives the cardinal a small token — by a gifted gunsmith in San Antonio. It was a true machine pistol, a Government .45, but with certain adjustments to its internals so that one pull of the trigger emptied all the rounds in a three-second blast. Because it fired so fast, it needed a lot of ammo, and the gunsmith, Lebman, had carefully welded several magazines together so that it held eighteen of the robin’s-egg-sized .45 ACP cartridges. Because the longer the trigger was held down, the more the recoil built, it meant rounds ten through eighteen would have been hosepiped aimlessly across the sky, but Lebman had thought this one through as well. He had mounted both the Cutts compensator and the horizontal foregrip from a full-sized Tommy to the pistol, the comp to fight the muzzle’s rise, the forestock to offer the second hand a sculpted wedge of wood with finger grooves by which it could be pulled against the same muzzle’s rise. You could zip off a magazine, therefore, with a fair chance of staying on target through the whole of the transaction, all eighteen rounds’ worth, as no force on earth or in engineering could halt the gun’s hunger for ammo once the trigger had been jacked.

So he couldn’t have been more perfectly prepared for what lay ahead. Nothing beats or satisfies like the perfect tool for the otherwise undoable job. He ducked back to the porch, cut left, and dashed down its short length. Bullets came his way, but were magically dissuaded from his flesh, or so he believed, by the charisma of his boldness and the size of his personality, and indeed a few struck nearby, tearing out splinters and debris and pulverized wood, but nothing struck him, and in a second he was off the porch and had deviated backwards, where the woods soon swallowed him.