Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“She knows it was a joke. Mr. Laugh-a-Second, that’s me.”

“All right, Homer,” said Johnny, “get ready to move in a couple hours. Looks like I’m the guy who’ll drive you back to St. Paul.”

“You’re a prince, Johnny,” said Mickey. “Always count on Johnny for being a good guy. He never lets anyone down. Unlike some other guys who ain’t so noble.”

“I don’t have room for that mook,” said Les. “And I ain’t no chauffeur.”

Things settled down, as each fellow decompressed from the shoot-out in different ways, Homer by aching and moaning; Johnny by smoking cigars and sipping Pikesville rye in shirtsleeves on the porch, watching the sun set over Indiana’s green fields; Jack by being innocuous and, secretly aware he didn’t belong, swearing to never do this kind of work again; and Les by slowly cooking off his rage and hatred at the world for again denying him the dignity he felt he had earned.

By nightfall, he had settled into a kind of dull spell and didn’t feel like much fun at all. He was like a reptile, all heated up and feisty in the hot weather, dolorous and numb in the cold. John Paul had to take the initiative.

“Okay, I’m going to get him back to Helen now, and then to Chicago.”

“Don’t forget his cut. He’ll go nuts again if he thinks he’s been cheated out of his cut.”

“Got it,” said Les. He patted his suit pocket where his near six grand had been wadded into a big roll. The Thompson had been broken down, buttstock separated from the receiver, the drums laid flat, the whole thing wrapped in canvas and stored in a large suitcase. Les still had a .45 aboard, and his .45 full-auto pistol between the seats, if it came to shooting, though with kids in the car, he knew he could never blast it out with the cops.

On the drive back to the cottage, as flat, dark Indiana slipped by, Les said to John Paul, “When we get back — first thing, we got to look for some new jobs or opportunities. Put out the word we’re looking for action, any action. Last time I’ll let Homer set anything up. He ain’t got the brains of a squirrel.”

“And with a bullet squashed against his skull,” said John Paul, “that would be a dumb squirrel.”

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA

July 3, 1934

After three twenty-hour days, they were pretty much done. Every witness had given a deposition, every bullet hole marked and charted, every surface read for fingerprints (none), every spent shell located, every square inch of the rather large crime scene examined, and examined in depth, then examined again. It was scientific crime fighting at its best, with pix of the suspect sent out by wire nationally, all small-town sheriffs and police chiefs notified: “These men are heavily armed and dangerous. Do not approach. Contact Justice Department, Division of Investigation, Washington, D.C.”

Now a last meeting, in the grand ballroom of the South Bend Excelsior, where the fifteen tired agents gathered, with shorthand notes taken and transcript typed by Mrs. Donovan, as all conclusions were hashed out and formalized.

Finally, Purvis got around to Charles.

“Sheriff, you looked at the shooting aspects of the event. I saw you on your knees most days, taking close notes over spent casings, so I’m betting you have something for us.”

“Well, Mr. Purvis, I don’t think I come up with anything you and all these bright young fellas don’t already know. I do have some observations.”

“Please, go ahead.”

“Here’s what I got, not IDs so much as personalities. Maybe some help when we get close and have to figure how to arrest. What I see is two cool hands, one dumb ox, one nothing, and one nutcase.

“Johnny and Homer are the cool hands. They make this robbery work, and, in a funny way, they keep the casualty numbers down. First, look at Johnny. Never fires a shot, or at least I could find no .45 shells on the floor inside the bank that, under the magnifying glass, didn’t have the little ejector-nick characteristic of Pretty Boy Floyd’s Thompson. So Johnny doesn’t shoot, and he even jokes with the folks he’s robbing, that’s how calm he is, but, at the same time, he knows it puts them at their ease, so they don’t panic and bust for the door, which would mean Pretty Boy would hose them down. We owe Johnny on that one. It stays a robbery and doesn’t become a massacre because of Johnny’s coolheadedness. Meanwhile, outside, Homer and his .351 are holding off the cops. He plugged one dead — Officer Wagner, God rest his soul — but after that he shoots accurately, driving cop after cop back, and I have to believe that as good a shot as he is, he could have killed cop after cop. But he knows that America sort of loves its bank robbers and that makes him feel good, that’s part of what he’s after, to be a ballplayer figure as much as an armed robber, and he knows if he kills ten small-town cops, it’ll be a different game. He won’t be no hero but instead a rabid mutt to be shot on sight. He needs that wide sense of public celebration to operate and he skillfully preserves it while taking fire. Also, while he’s up there taking fire, he’s letting all the others get to the car. Maybe he’s dead now, as several witnesses say they saw him take one in the head, and that’s a hit you don’t come back from too often. Anyway, he’s the hero of the bank crew, give it to him.

“Then there’s the dumb ox. That’s Pretty Boy. He’s really the fool that turned the whole thing into a gun battle. He makes a stupid decision when nobody obeys him and fires a thirteen-shot burst into the ceiling, walking the gun all over the place. It was a dumb move, the dumbest. He could have got their attention with one shot. And on the outside, what’s one loud noise? Could be a backfire, a bucket of paint falling off a ladder, one tenderfoot ramming another tenderfoot’s Model A, a door slamming, the baker hitting his wife, anything. Folks’d wonder, but that’s all. A good man on a Thompson don’t even have to move the lever to semi-auto, he’s got a light touch and can feather off a single. Ed Hollis over there can fire singles on full auto all day long, I’ve seen him do it. Not Pretty Boy, and once the sub gun goes rat-a-tat-tat, the jig’s up. And from then on he don’t do much except spray, pray, and take up space. Didn’t hit anybody, could only come up with a few bullet holes in windows, which means he was mostly hitting sky. Oh, he did manage to hit Clark Gable in the head on the movie poster across the street.

“That leaves two. The least interesting is the lookout. No long gun because he had to stand outside so long trying to be invisible, no spent shells, which means he never reloaded his wheel gun. I guess he was their tip-off man, but other than a nod, he didn’t do much. Again, I couldn’t find anything he hit, but if you get around to digging all the bullets out of all the walls, you might find a few was .38s, and that’d be his contribution. The names I hear are John Paul Chase, Jack Perkins, Fatso Negri, all Baby Face cronies. Maybe it’s one of them, maybe he’s a Johnny fan or even, God help us, another Oklahoma sodbuster. Don’t know.

“Finally, Nelson. This punk has a firecracker where his brain ought to be. He’s a hophead who don’t need no hops. Don’t know what makes him tick, but he don’t have no trouble spraying a city street full of moms and kids with his Tommy gun, and if he didn’t hit nothing, it wasn’t for lack of trying. God must have had his eye on South Bend that day. I counted, all told, seventy-seven spent .45 casings with the mark of his Thompson extractor on them, meaning he ripped off one full drum, reloaded, and ripped off half of another. Then he stood over that hero kid, Joe Pawlowski, and put rounds into him, though by the grace of God and Nelson’s excitability, he managed to miss everything but the boy’s hand.”