Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Charles anchored the line. Captain Frank put him there because he wanted boys he trusted at key spots. Frank wasn’t the sort to leave much to chance, which is why, fifty-one men later, he was still alive (though he’d been hit seventeen times). So that is why Charles sat in full man-hunting stillness in the bush, twenty feet from the gravel. Next to him, though invisible, was the Dallas policeman Ted Hinton with a big Browning gun, and then some of the Louisiana boys (Charles hadn’t caught their names), then Manny Gault, another trusted friend of the captain’s, another Louisiana fellow, and finally, anchoring the other end, the captain himself. They all sat or crouched, aspiring to different styles of stillness and silence, clearly men on the stalk, though some were born to it and others merely pretending they knew what they were up to. A cough, a slap at a mosquito, a hawked gob of phlegm, a scratched itch, a shuffle, all muted, kept in close, all of them with hats at ears and brims nearly to eyes, after what most guessed and some knew was the gunman’s style.

You’d have thought this posse was off on a raid in the Great War, so heavily armed it was, and Charles should know, having led many a raid in the Great War. Then, as now, he had a .45 Government Model in a shoulder holster, but not as then a Model 97 short-barreled Winchester riot gun leaning next to the tree and another of Mr. Browning’s fine creations, a semi-auto Model 8 in .35 caliber, in his hands. It held five big rounds and could be fired quick, as the trigger went back on it, a skill that took some practice, though with Charles’s gift for the firearm, not as much practice as with some others.

But Charles would have been fearsome without the hardware. He was a tall man, seemingly assembled from blades. He was forty-three, had a hard, long, angular blade of a body, a blade of a nose, two cheekbones that looked as if they could cut steel, and was long everywhere else, arms, fingers, legs, even toes. If you could meet his eyes — few could — they were black anthracite, and when they fixed and narrowed on something, that something was about to get a hole in it. Though it would be another hot, airless, dusty Louisiana day — a July day by Arkansas standards, an August day by Chicago or Washington standards — he wore a three-piece suit of thick gray wool herringbone, a black tie cinched tight, as it always was, a sheriff’s star on his lapel, and a pair of brown high-top boots. A brown felt fedora was pulled low on his face, as if to shield the world from the force of his eyes. He looked like a funeral director, which was close, as he was really a funeral provider.

“See anything there, Sheriff?” came a softly phrased question through the bush. Hinton, who couldn’t stay true to manhunt discipline and had squirmed and chattered the last few hours as if he were on the beach or at the bar.

“Not a goddamned thing,” said Charles.

Another of Charles’s freakish attributes was his vision, held by all to be unusually sharp. It was perhaps the key to his shooting, and it was another reason the captain wanted him farthest out. His job wasn’t merely to shoot well but to see well; the captain counted on him to catch a whisper of dust from a long distance to announce that a car was coming, about to crest a low hill, under the guidance of a fast and skillful driver, which would mean the commencement of the day’s work and the conclusion of a long and grueling ordeal.

Charles scanned for dust again, saw no disturbance in the atmosphere, and wondered if this one was going to go south like all the other ambushes. This pair of peckerwoods was hard to figure because they were such creatures of childish whimsy, going here and there as the mood took them. It was like hunting not sparrows but a particular pair of sparrows, trying to guess where they’d be when the sparrow brain was not advanced enough to encompass any notion of the future.

“Maybe we ought to pull tail. Could use me a nice iced tea. My mouth’s full of dust ’n’ grit.”

“You just hold still,” said Charles. “The captain gives the orders and we sit until he tells us we don’t sit no more.”

He scanned again. Trees, trees, trees. Across the gravel road, an old truck and an old man. But it was all ambush theater, a decoy to bring in the scrawny sparrows. The truck was on a jack and its tire lay in the middle of the gravel. The old man lounged on the running board. His name was Ivy and he was father to a boy who ran with the pip-squeaks. All this was happening by arrangement with and through him. In exchange for getting his boy Henry off on certain Texas charges, the old man had volunteered to keep the man hunters up on the ramblings of the outlaw pair and to act as tethered goat in the actual ambush if it came.

Charles was an Arkansawyer. He was hero of the Great War in two armies, one Canadian, one American. He was the winner of the famous First National of Blue Eye Gunfight in 1923, when he had killed three city boys with heavy guns who’d wanted to take a small-town bank for liquor money. He was the father of two boys, each one more of a mystery than the other. He was the sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas. He was here in secret at the captain’s request because the captain felt gun time was near and he wanted men with him who’d done the work before and none were better at it than Sheriff Charles F. Swagger.

It was about then, getting on to 9 a.m., he saw it. Just a trace of drift against a far-off green wall of trees, nothing really there, but to his sharp vision, it was bold as a dancing girl.

“Car bearing this way, coming down fast.”

“Yes sir,” said Ted, with a slight tweak to his voice indicating a spurt of emotion, and he heard Ted turn and say, “Coming in. Coming in. Get yourselves ready.”

For just a second it sounded like they were in a factory, not on the edge of the woods. That was because of clicks, clacks, whacks, cranks, and snaps — all gun business. Safeties came off, bolts were released, slides thrown, levers and pump actions jacked to lift .30-30s or twelve-gauge buck into chambers. There was probably also, if you listened close enough, the low hiss of breath, sucked hard into lungs for the enriching force of the oxygen, being now expelled as each man, seeing action on the come, tried to breathe his way toward control of the yips that coursed through hands and arms and the fear that suddenly lubricated each thought and breath. Lots of guns would be fired, lots of lead in the air, and no one could predict with any certainty what would happen yet.

“Ivy, get your goddamned old scrawny ass up and start dinking with the jack” came the captain’s order to his tethered old goat, and the old man stood, his face suddenly acquiring the gravity of its own fear, and then hustled over to the jack and pretended to be making adjustments.

“You boys, now, you wait to my command while I check to see when Ivy breaks free of our line of fire,” the captain explained casually, he and Charles the only two among them whose heartbeat hadn’t increased a thump. “And then again, maybe it ain’t them, only the Baptist minister up to say words over a dead Negro. We don’t need no Mexican hat dance like them federals at Little Bohemia.”

No one wanted that: the wrong people shot and killed or wounded, federal officers downed, and all gangsters gotten away into the cold Midwestern night. It was a famous fiasco, a warning for all who carried steel, lead, and a badge.

Sounds now of men squirming in the brush, acquiring a tension-engineered shooting position. Most chose to go to one knee, some tucking foot under ass. A slouchy feed bag like Frank probably didn’t think too much of such a thing and just made himself comfortable. Charles went into an athlete’s crouch, because he would be the only one breaking cover. His job, now that the early sighting was done, was to rotate around the vehicle to get shots in from the quarter angle, then close and finish the job with his Government Model if needed. If by some strange chance either bad one made it out of the car on this side, Charles would handle the last applications of rough justice, issuing quick dispatch. His long finger went to the safety lever of the Model 8, which was a gigantic thing (another reason your gun-savvy peace officers liked it, as it required no fumbling with a nubbin of a button when lead filled the air), and slid it smoothly down. He tucked the rifle under his shoulder and coiled the necessary muscles to break from cover, circle fast and low behind, and come up on the other side.