Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Asshole,” cried Les at the boy, then killed him, raking the fallen boy with a splatter of .45s that brutalized yet more vapor and debris into the air. He turned back, and still aflame with rage at the world for denying him the dignity and grace he required of it, unleashed another long burst in the general direction of everywhere, and with his superb marksmanship, hit that target squarely.

His moment of kingly conquest, however, vanished when, too damned close, a car window atomized as someone had rushed a twelve-gauge blast at him, missing and blowing out the window instead, and he turned to answer, seeing no shooter, so he just finished the drum into the city. It took a few seconds to unsnap it, pull it out, then toss it, grab the second one, which had been wedged through all this in his pants at the small of his back and had not come loose, and rolled away and slid the heavy thing into place — you had to thread the metal lip into slots milled into the receiver on each side for tight locking. Then he rammed back the bolt atop the beauty and, presto, he was back in the fight.

“Oops, folks, ain’t done with you yet!” yelled Johnny, gesturing with his .45 at the bank officers in the office. “Get your asses out here and earn your cut.”

The three men exchanged worried glances, but Johnny’s big Colt was the more convincing argument, and so they obeyed, even as outside someone was refighting the Somme.

“Make a little circle around us, fellows,” said Johnny. “And relax, your friends ain’t gonna shoot you. Who’d foreclose on ’em then?”

The three took positions around Johnny and Charlie, and together the five began an awkward shuffle-dance to the door and out, where the police — many had arrived to take up positions behind abandoned cars — instantly opened fire.

Homer hunted for targets, taking a shot at a cop with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in a car window next to Les, aiming low, not to kill but to send the fellow running. It seemed like there were cops everywhere — who knew they had so many in this shithole? — and he went after them, but always put the bullet near, but not into, the cop, forcing him to spin and duck away. But if he was missing them, they were missing him, and the lead filling the air like ice pellets was generally useless.

He looked over at Jack on the other side of the entrance, saw him to be frozen, and yelled, “Goddammit, open up! Drive ’em back, don’t just stand there!”

Jack nodded, swallowed behind his cigar, and came out with a revolver of some sort, which he proceeded to fire to no purpose other than noise and maybe a fractured window here and there.

At that moment the bank doors blew open and a mob emerged, revealing itself to be Johnny and Charlie and three hostages. If the cops paused, it was for less than a second, because immediately they opened up, and some jackrabbit in blue had worked over to the left with a pump gun and he blasted at the group twice, though low, and the hostages went down as Charlie whirled in pain, then regained his composure and sent a fleet of hardball slugs off to punish the shooter.

“Let’s get out of here!” screamed Johnny. “I got the swag.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s go,” yelled Homer in reply, grabbing Charlie to point him, though his leg trailed blood from the charge of twelve, toward the car.

Homer, jokester and vaudeville fool, was magnificent. After launching Charlie, he stood upright, clicked in another magazine of .351s, and went into the statue mode, calm, strong, without tremor or doubt, providing aimed fire near, but not into, the cops, while the three others staggered to the car, like the drummer, the fifer, and the flag bearer of Yankee Doodle Dandy legend. They got in, and Homer screamed at Les, just coming up from a reload, to join them.

Les nodded, rose, and ran, covering himself with one-handed shooting, yielding much noise but little consequence, while Homer, again heroic beyond reproach, stood, firing calmly, driving the cops back with well-aimed marksman’s rounds that instructed the recipient to keep his head down if he cared to survive.

When at last Les had made it, Homer raced his own self to the car, careful to weave around the front and thereby not expose himself to Charlie’s fusillade as it poured from the rear window, another careful example of shooting at everything and hitting nothing, except putting a bullet mustache on the face of a movie poster on the air-conditioned picture-show palace across the street. Charlie, in his rush, may have thought Gable was a cop.

Homer threw in his now empty .351, slid into driver’s seat, and then it felt like he caught a Dempsey haymaker in the side of the head, saw a flash in which he and his brothers threw apples at Billy Dawes and his brothers in a war they had fought in 1912, and then went to sleep.

No dignity! None! He ran like a comedy hobo, with his pants on fire and a mob after him with a rope, as clouds of spray and grit flailed him. All the cops in the world were shooting at him!

Les turned slightly, raising the Thompson with one arm, and squeezed, sending a crowd of missiles a half inch wide into space. It was as much for his own morale as it was to drive the cops back, though indeed it did seem to quiet the less aggressive police shooters.

“Come on, goddammit!” yelled Homer, who stood like a monument, dishing out his rifle rounds, stopping to reload in a dazzling blur, while simultaneously the small knot of robbers reached the idling Hudson and — no dignity here, either — piled in.

Somehow, Les made it to a safe zone behind the fender only to feel Homer’s strong farm-boy hand on his arm, pulling him toward the rear door, still open for him.

“Cock-a-doodle, don’t get tagged,” yelled Homer, really shoving him face-first into the melee that was already two men deep, with Charlie trying to squirt up to get gun to window to fire, and poor Jack, scared witless, trying to untangle himself from Charlie. When he landed, Les felt a blow to his nose, which was issued by Jack’s plunging knee, bellowed, “OW!” and slid to the floor like a child, as Jack sort of segued over him with, of all things, a bag in his hands. Then the roar of Charlie’s Thompson, as he finally got it into play and began hosing down Michigan Street.

Les got himself up but couldn’t get close enough to the window to get his hose-gun muzzle out and he didn’t want to fire inside, as the recoil could bounce it around the car cab.

The driver’s-side door opened, Homer tossed in his rifle, slid in, and put foot to pedal, one hand to wheel and the other hand to brake — then suddenly snapped, elongating to full length, as he was hit in the head. Les could almost feel the vibration as the bullet blew into Homer’s thick, slicked-down hair and threw blood spots across the upholstered ceiling of the car.

Purvis came rushing out of his office, climbed on a desk, and began to bellow.

“All right, the bastards have shot the hell out of South Bend, nobody knows how many dead. We have good preliminary IDs on Dillinger and Pretty Boy, and you can bet the other whiz kids are there too. Mr. Cowley is on the phone with Washington, we’re trying to get a Tri-Motor ginned up at Metropolitan. Mr. Cowley will stay here and coordinate with Washington, the Director, and the various agencies involved, and there are a lot of them. Clegg, you and your people stay here with him and give Mr. Cowley your total support. If I hear— Well, let’s just put it this way: any order from Mr. Cowley is to be viewed as an order from me. If we have to move fast and I’m not available, he may call directly on field agents, and you jump too if that happens. Any questions?”

“Do we have time to pack?”

“Nope. You can wash out your drawers in the sink, and we’ll go in together on razor blades and shave cream and toothpaste. Sam will rent us some rooms in the town. He’ll have that by the time we land, but we won’t be sleeping, except on the plane, until tomorrow night. I want to get there while the scene is hot. We’ll see if you science geniuses can come up with an actual clue or something.”