Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Charles and Hurt found their spot. In a few minutes, they saw Hollis move into place, just across the sidewalk and up a bit, angled against a car with a slight bend, as if he were talking to a friend sitting in it.

“Hurt, mosey over there and grab Hollis. I want to talk to you birds.”

Hurt nodded, ambled with exaggerated casualness to Hollis, passed the word, and each went through a bit of pantomime before they arrived back at Charles’s spot.

“Okay, y’all recall the briefing?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Now forget it.”

“Ah, Sheriff, what do—”

“I said forget it. Too busy, too many moving parts, too much coordination, too much depending on stuff that can’t be controlled. So you don’t look for Purvis’s cigar. You don’t look for a lady in orange. You don’t look for a fellow without a jacket in a straw hat. Got that?”

“Sheriff—”

“You look at me and only at me. I’ll spot Mrs. Sage. In the first place, Purvis is short, he may not see Johnny. In the second place, Purvis is short, you and our other chums may not see Purvis. That’s how it turns to crap, with nobody knowing, everybody trying to see stuff that can’t be seen.”

“Yes sir.”

“Ed Hollis, I didn’t hear a ‘Yes sir.’”

“Yes sir,” said Hollis over a gulp of air.

“I will move behind him, slide through the crowd. Hurt, you’re on my left. Hollis, you wait until we’re past. Also, neither of you fellows are to look directly at him. You’ll see him clearly enough when we close, but these big-time bad men with lots of gun experience, they can feel eyes on ’em — some sort of snake instinct, I think. If you’re staring at him, he will feel it, I guarantee it. Got it?”

“Yes sir.”

“After we pass, Hollis, that’s when you break from your position and come onto us. You’re to the left of Hurt. We’re three abreast, just behind him. Okay?”

Nods.

“Next thing. The two boys converging from the alley? Forget ’em. You got enough to worry about without trying to time it right so that they’re where they’re supposed to be. They don’t matter. Nothing matters, because once we get in contact distance of Johnny, we go. You both have your .38s holstered on your belt?”

“Yes sir” came the replies.

“You can put your hand on the grips under your jackets. That way, you aren’t disobeying no orders. But if Johnny wants to go hard, you will have to draw and shoot fast, making sure you see both the gun and him as you squeeze. You will find the point of aim naturally, but only if your eyes are driving the action. You don’t shoot until the gun is low in your vision and the barrel is pointed right at him, right at that white shirt, which ain’t gonna be but two feet ahead of you, then you fire. Got that?”

Again: “Yes sir.”

“As I reach him, I’ll skip ahead a step, so I’m at a kind of forty-five-degree angle to him. I will call him out. ‘Johnny,’ is all I need to say. And, believe me, he will know it’s him I’m talking to. That’s the key moment. He may draw, he may reach for the sky. It’s his call. If he reaches, you two break him down, wrap his arms around backwards, knock his knees out, and get him in cuffs. I will have him covered. Now, if he decides to go, and if it turns out he’s faster or he has a sleeve gun or maybe a crossdraw under his shirt, or if he even goes for a gun in the pocket, he will turn on me, and maybe he’s faster, maybe I’m faster. In any event, if he gets a shot off, it’ll be into me. Y’all will have clear shots, but keep moving into him and, as he goes down, be sure to track him and adjust your own hold to keep your slugs in him and not Joe Blow three feet ahead.”

“Sheriff, if we come around him from the left and he cottons to it, draws, and gets a shot off, it could go our way instead of toward you—”

“No, this is the game I signed up to play and I will play it full out. I will initiate. Got it?”

The two younger men looked at each other and could think of nothing to say.

“Got it?” Charles repeated.

“Yes sir.”

“Since I’m set, my drawstroke should be faster than his, unless he’s John Wesley Hardin, and I believe John Wesley Hardin is dead. So in that situation, I’ll draw and fire. I don’t believe in shooting a man once. It’s against my religion. If he’s worth shooting, he has to be shot a lot. I’ll put three or four into him. And that should be that. And you don’t tell nobody about this little chat. As far as you’re concerned, you followed Sam’s plan perfectly, Sam had it all figured out. And if it goes wrong, it was because I got it screwed up. You don’t blame Sam or Melvin or even Clegg. Any mess is on me. Got it?”

“Yes sir.”

Charles glanced at his watch: 10:16.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”

It was happening, though somehow time slowed down so it all poked along at five miles an hour. Charles saw the tallish woman he recognized from the severe profile as Sage, slid his eyes to the man next to her, and beheld John Dillinger.

Johnny seemed to have melted a bit, or perhaps wilted would be the right word, for his clearly recognizable features were subtly softer, as if the bloom that drove the bush had finished and everything had lost its precision and begun the fall to earth. He’d added a mustache too, not Gable’s full swagger of Fuller Brush but a more sophisticated, more dapper little pencil line just above the lip. He sparkled. Whatever you could say about the man, he had “it,” which nobody could quite define, but it made him the one you noticed. Perhaps it was his comfort with himself, perhaps it was a number one’s sense of entitlement and belief in his own self-achieved placement high in human aristocracy, or maybe it was just sheer animal testosterone, pure rampant, wanton masculinity radiating from every pore. Even now, the man wore his sloppy grin and wide-eyed apprehension of all things large and small with perfect grace. He actually looked good in a straw boater. The hat was tilted rakishly, he held hands with Polly, and the two were in lovers’ syncopation as they walked the walk. His shirt billowed slightly — he was one of those men who wore his clothes well and turned every off-the-rack suit into a London tailor’s masterpiece.

At that point, Charles slid his .45 from its holster, keeping his finger off the trigger, feeling the rawhide strip tight against and disabling the grip safety, snicked off the frame safety with his thumb, and inserted the weapon deftly into his waistband, just to the left of the belt buckle. Then he eased ahead, with his left hand quietly pushing his suit coat a little unnaturally to the right to cover the automatic’s big grip. He felt Hurt beside him, heard the Oklahoma detective take a brief breath and mimic Charles’s easy glide through the crowd. The two tried to slip, and not push, as they moved a little faster with each step, oriented on the silhouette of Johnny’s straw boater, which was twenty-five feet ahead, then twenty, then fifteen.

Charles felt as if he was sliding, as he kept cranking a little to left or right to get between folks ahead of him without touching or forcing, turning sideways to get a shoulder between and ooze or wiggle through. If he was breathing hard, he didn’t feel it at all, he just watched as Johnny grew nearer and bigger. Somewhere in here, he felt Hollis coming from the right, and he was aware that the young agent had gotten around Hurt and they now formed a line of three abreast. And if this last little knot of happy moviegoers could just be penetrated and passed, they’d be there and it would be time.

Charles broke from the two, edged his way with perhaps too much energy between a man and woman talking about the great Gable, and suddenly came free so that nobody was between him and Johnny and his two gals.