Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Hard to find the goddamned road,” said Les. “No road markers out here or anything. No lights. Just prairie and trees. What a boring place!”

“But you don’t want no action, do you, Les?”

“You’re right. And I’m not sightseeing neither. I ain’t no tourist.”

They rolled onward, Les checking his watch—1:45 a.m. — and in a bit hit the mark.

Miller was a nondescript farm road that ran west, unpaved, designated only by a billboard on the northeast corner for Standard Oil, showing a happy family packed in the car on a vacation trip: The Open Road — It’s the American Way! it said.

“Okay, folks, we made it. Helen, honey, an hour here, read a magazine or something, and then we’ll check in someplace and you can take a shower and get some sleep.”

“It sounds so great. I’d kill for twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest.”

“You don’t need to kill nobody, honey. That’s Daddy’s job.”

They turned left, onto Miller, and drove about a quarter of a mile, over a rise in the road, then downhill into a dip. The big Hudson tossed dust as it progressed, and then Les slid off the road and parked.

They sat quiet as the dust settled and the big car cooled down, occasionally offering a mysterious click or snap or crunch. Les patted the wheel.

“Nice doggie,” he said. “You relax now too while Les takes care of business. You okay, Helen?”

“Yeah, babe. I’m fine. I have the new Modern Screen .”

“So who do I look more like? Gable or Fredric March?”

“You remind me more of the New York guy, Cagney.”

“He’s too Hell’s Kitchen.”

“No, Les, she’s right,” said J.P. “You’ve got his pep, his quick moves, his guts.”

“Yeah, yeah, I see it now. Hey, good thing there’s no grapefruit around.”

“You better not, Les,” squealed Helen, laughing. “I’ll smack you right back!”

“I know you would, sweetie.” Les laughed, getting out of the car. He lounged against the fender, enjoying the night sky, the lower temperature after a July scorcher cramped in the car. The breeze fell gentle against his face, the crickets buzzed, occasionally a shooting star left an incandescent blur across the black vastness up top. Up there, far away, pinwheels and comets blazed, but it meant nothing to him other than display. He just saw fireworks. He glanced at his watch, whose radium dial told him it was 1:50, and just at that second headlight beams swung his direction as one car, then another, both Fords, turned off Wolf and down Miller, raising their own mild spumes of dust as they approached. He waved.

The two cars pulled off and parked not far from his, and he felt a surge of warmth as his guys piled out. Fatso and Jack were in the first car, Carey Lieder in the second.

“There they are,” said Les. “The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and his electric corncob.”

All three laughed, and J.P. got out of the backseat of Les’s Hudson and joined in the group hug and hand-slapping-hand, hand-shaking-hand, arm-pumping, backslapping greeting scrum. It looked like Notre Dame had just beat Navy 28–3.

“Man, you guys look good.”

“Glad you’re back, Les,” said Fatso.

“Now we can get stuff rolling,” said Jack. “And this time we’ll do it right.” He bent, waved, yelled, “Hi, Helen, how’s the girl?” and Les’s wife smiled, waved back.

The five of them moved over to a space between the cars and lounged on fenders and bumpers, enjoying one another’s company, lighting up, Jack the same brand cigar he’d smoked in South Bend, J.P. and Fatso firing up cigarettes.

“How’d she run?” asked Carey, pointing to the Hudson, wanting to make sure he got credit for his only tangible contribution to this confab of authentic big guys.

“Like a top,” said Les. “That Hudson builds some kind of machine. Hey, Jack can tell you, if the Hudson doesn’t move like a bat out of hell when Johnny punches it, we’re pinched in South Bend and looking at ten-to-twenty at Crown Point.”

“Yeah, and old Homer’s got a date with a certain big chair for clipping that cop!”

“Damn, that’s the only thing we did wrong,” said Les. “Should have left Homer at the curb!”

More laughter, though Jack’s was forced, for he remembered it was Homer who’d covered them all and kept the cops back when the battle was at its most pitched.

Then Les had his scoop.

“I got something big for you,” he said. “Johnny wants in on this one. He’s shacking up with a whore on the North Side, but this deal is so sweet and easy, he wants a piece of it. Having the big guy along will make it easy. I got a meet set up with him.”

“What about Homer?” Fatso wondered. “Did that slug in the head knock any of those corny jokes out of him?”

“Mickey got him back to St. Paul. He’s okay. It’ll take a while, but he’ll be back full steam. I don’t want him, we don’t need him, it shrinks the cut, so there’s a lot of reasons to keep him out. No Charlie Floyd, either, that dumb ox. He’s probably in the basement of some Anadarko whorehouse drinking up the last of his seven grand… Okay, let’s get down to it.”

“I got a line on soup,” said Jack. “It wasn’t easy, that stuff is hard to come by. But I know a guy whose brother is a mine foreman in Kentucky, and I drove down last weekend to see if he could put us on to it. It won’t be cheap, but he’s going to drive it up and handle it for us. He says otherwise we’ll blow ourselves up. It’s tricky.”

“Is he a solid guy?” asked Les. “Our work is tricky too.”

“For five grand, he’ll be Alvin friggin’ York. Yeah, he’s solid. Miner. That’s the hardest, most dangerous work there is. Have to be a hero to even think about making a living a thousand feet down for a buck an hour!”

“Okay, good. Five grand seems okay.”

“That’s good,” said Jack. “That’ll make him happy.”

The reports went on. Carey had two cars lined up, purchased cheap from a downstate car-theft ring operating out of Cairo, on the Mississippi. He said he’d get ’em in in a week, work ’em over, make sure they did eighty on the straightaway, were lively on the pedal, and had heavy-duty shocks for any hairpins that came along.

“I hope we don’t need ’em,” said Les. “I want this one to go easy, no gunfights in downtown anywhere, no high-speed escapes.”

“Amen to that,” came the chorus.

“Have you picked a site yet, Les?”

“Nah. I want to drive the whole Illinois section and see what’s best. Also, now that I’m thinking of it, Carey, you head down there too and find a school bus you can boost. We park that baby on the track and you watch how fast that train comes to a halt.”

“Hey, that’s good, Les.”

“Damned right,” said Les.

Fatso reported on the train itself. It was Illinois Central 909, originating in Iowa City. At six of its thirteen Friday stops it picked up money sacks from federal banks, all headed to the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. As Jimmy Murray had estimated, it could easily go over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and even stepped on five times — now six with Johnny, with the soup guy, cut in — that worked out to forty-one grand apiece, not bad for a night’s work.

“So by the time we get all this shit done and our soup up here, it’s going to be at least another month. You guys okay on dough?”

The chorus all jabbered in the affirmative.

“Great,” said Les. “Now, let’s—”

At that moment a wash of headlights rotated by and crossed them, revealing them, as another car turned down Miller.

“Shit,” said J.P.

“It’s a goddamned cop car,” said Fatso, as for a brief second the black-and-white color scheme of the vehicle stood out against the glow of Chicago to the east as it headed down the road before it disappeared momentarily behind the rise.