Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Mel, what about logistics?”

“I will have Mrs. Donovan along, not right away but tomorrow by train, to handle typing up reports and keeping us up with anything from the Director that doesn’t come to Sam or me directly. Anything more?”

That seemed to be it. The guys were young, bunked together in apartments, five to the joint, or just married and had prepped their wives for this sort of action. But Mel covered that too.

“The rest of you call wives, or whatever, and tell ’em, tell them you’re on the road until further notice. Hollis, you get the Thompsons issued, and plenty of .45 and .38.”

“BARs?” asked Hollis. The big .30 caliber guns were so penetrative, they were seldom issued.

“No, not this time. If we think we’ll need ’em, we’ll send for ’em. Sheriff, you’re on the South Bend team, we want you looking hard at the shooting aspects. Big gun battle, tell us what happened and how. Jesus Christ, it’s still smoking. Okay, people, why are you still here? Let’s go!”

“Christ!” yelled Johnny, and in a flash had yanked Homer’s corpse under while going over, and again though it was without dignity, it was not without proficiency. Johnny was fast in action, and everything he did was right and smart and not driven by the panic that Les could sense riding in the desperate muscles of both Charlie and Jack on either side. He cracked a grin. Johnny! The best! Always!

Johnny clutch-pumped into gear, veered into the street, found a path through the obstacle course of shot-up cars on the road ahead, took the car through several sharp and squealy turns, riding two tires as it cranked around the corner, while Charlie emptied his drum into the sky, the bag in Jack’s hands turning out to be full of carpet tacks, which he seeded the road with behind them. There was nothing for Les to do except hope that Johnny could outdrive the law.

Soon enough, Johnny found a stretch of empty, straight highway out of town and hammered it. Like a beast, the great Hudson in-line eight delivered its full-throttle roar, spewing exhaust as it ate the pavement.

The world turned to blur, and Johnny held at eighty, gracefully passing slower cars ahead of him, driving oncomers into ditches with his bravado, and the car sailed along toward the empty Indiana horizon, soon into fields of corn and wheat and roads so straight that it seemed they had entered fantasy.

“We’re in the money,” came a voice from somewhere, and, damn, if Homer, blood sopping the left side of his face, didn’t pull himself up with a grin.

GREENCASTLE, INDIANA

July 1, 1934

“Twenty-eight grand!” Les shouted at Homer. “We went through the battle of Verdun for a lousy twenty-eight grand! I got shot for twenty-eight lousy grand!”

Homer didn’t really respond to him. He was glassy-eyed, tending to drift into and out of reality, and had a killer headache.

“He ain’t right,” said Johnny. “The bullet didn’t go through, but you take a bash like that and your brains are scrambled. It’ll be a couple weeks before he’s back to himself.”

Mickey Conforti had wiped the blood off his face and improvised a kind of bandage from a dishrag. She’d soaked another one in cold water and curled it over his brow. He lay on a beat-up sofa in the back room of the Green Cat Tavern, where the gang had gone for refuge after meeting another confederate in another Hudson, dumping the original, and picking their way back here over back roads. All that remained was the split-up and the trip home, wherever that might be.

“So let’s get it over, goddammit,” said Les. “I got to raise some cash for the winter months. I got kids to feed, I got a wife who needs a new coat.”

“When she molts, you can trade that in for some new scales and rattles,” said Homer from the sofa.

“See, he ain’t hurt. He’s just hiding down there so he doesn’t have to say, ‘Hey, I screwed up, there wasn’t any stamp money to speak of, why don’t you boys take my share to make up for my mistake.’”

“Calm down, Les,” said Johnny. “He earned his share. Twenty-eight isn’t a bad day’s take.”

“Less than six apiece, Johnny. Chicken feed! When Jimmy Murray set a job up for us, he never put us in a place where we took out less than fifty. And we didn’t have to shoot our way out. Those cops were just about to call in the artillery.”

“Okay, guys,” said Charlie Floyd, “I got my take, I’m hitting the road. Time to get scarce. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure because it ain’t, but now’s the time to find a hole, preferably a broad’s hole—”

“Charlie!” said Johnny, “there’s a lady here.”

“It’s all right, Johnny,” said Mickey. “I heard worse.”

“Anyhow, anybody got any good-byes or hugs for me? No, I didn’t think so. Then I’m gone.”

With that, his Thompson disassembled already and packed in a suitcase, his fifty-six hundred dollars crumpled into the same suitcase, he gave a nod and headed out.

Les’s verdict: “Dumb cluck’ll hit a trooper roadblock and get himself killed or captured, and if he’s captured, he’ll rat us out in a second.”

“Charlie’s okay,” said Johnny. “Les, you have to calm down.”

“Easy for you to say, Johnny. You didn’t get clipped in the gut, then jumped by some hick trying to be a picture hero. I feel like Dempsey teed off into my chest. You just walked in and walked out.”

“Someone had to keep his head,” said Johnny.

“I didn’t lose my head. I needed to keep the cops down and away and that’s what I did. If I didn’t empty two drums into your home state, we’d be looking at life-plus-forever at Crownsville. And, this time, no wood gun will get us out. You only get to use that trick once.”

“Les, there’s no quieting you when you get a rage on like this. Chase, can’t you take him to Helen and she can talk some sense to him?”

“We’ll go after dark,” said Chase, who’d driven the new Hudson down to pick them up at the old Hudson.

Chase was a tall, angular man, by no means unattractive, by no means an exemplar of the gangster charisma and lifestyle, who always dressed neat and who, for some reason or other, had been infatuated with Les ever since they met performing mysterious errands in Reno a few years earlier. Who knew the chemistry of the connection, and who could even understand it? He was one of a series of minor-league hitters in orbit around Les. John Paul Chase would always be there for Les, and if you wanted to work with Les, John Paul was the price you paid, though it wasn’t a high price since the guy was pretty solid in his own right.

And Chase was one of the few who could talk sense into Les, control him, get him settled down and halfway rational again. That was half his value right there.

“But, Les,” he now consoled, “Johnny’s right. No sense staying all het up about it. You got out clean, nobody’s dead, nobody’s bleeding out, nobody’s hooked, you copped some good dough, times being what they are, and Helen’ll give you a nice back rub when you get back to the cottage.”

“Did you call her? I’m worried all the radio reports will have her worried.”

“I did. She’s swell. Making spaghetti for dinner.”

“Okay,” said Les.

“You got room in that big tub for Homer?” asked Johnny.

“Cock-a-doodle, no,” said Les. “It ain’t up to me to get him and his nun girlfriend back to St. Paul. I got John Paul, Jack, my two kids and Helen.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Les,” said Mickey from the sofa, where Homer was resting his head on her lap.

“That wasn’t very nice, Les, you should know better than that,” said Johnny.