Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Swagger ended up with twelve pounds of drummed-up Thompson gun on his lap in the backseat of a Dodge as it prowled and pawed up and down the dirt roads of Columbiana County, just north of East Liverpool, through a melee of autumn coloration, the season wearing its full glory. Ahead of him, wearing overcoats, scarves, fedoras, sat Purvis and Ed Hollis. Hollis was behind the wheel, while Sam McKee, out of the Cleveland Office, sat next to Charles. He had a Winchester pump riot gun, a dangerous piece of equipment, but unlike so many of the kids, he was a disciplined former police officer and wouldn’t accidentally shoot his or anybody else’s foot off. Behind them, another sedan carried four somewhat disgruntled and perhaps untrustworthy East Liverpool cops, including that department’s chief.

“Should we have gotten dogs, Charles?” Mel asked.

“You need something for them to read scent,” said Charles. “They can’t work without a scent. And since we ain’t got nothing off of Floyd but reports, they’ll just bark and shit and cause trouble.”

“Good, good, I knew I made the right decision.”

Everybody laughed. Mel, as always, was the charmer.

“I love it when I make the right decision,” he added, to more laughter.

Outside, where all eyes were trained intensely, East Ohio farmland rolled by, but in this part of the state, just off the big river, almost in Pennsylvania and the real East, it wasn’t the endlessly flat farmland of legend but instead hillier, full of clumps of gaudy orange-red trees, shadowy glades, small valleys, bare knobs, crosscut by streams, dotted with ponds, land that glaciers had torn all to hell a couple hundred thousand years ago, pushing boulders up here, squishing them down there, almost as if the ice sheets were designing a landscape in which desperadoes could hide efficiently. Wasn’t much to grow on land so scrambled, so it was mostly small dairy or sheep or cattle spreads owned by hard workers who worshipped as hard as they worked and were as hospitable to outsiders as hard as they worshipped.

“If these people weren’t so damned decent,” said Ed Hollis, “we wouldn’t have any trouble at all. In Iowa they’d call the cops the first sign of a stranger. Here, they invite ’em in, give ’em dinner, and a free night’s lodging, a new suit of clothes, and loan ’em the car and the daughter.”

Everybody laughed again.

“I take it they’re more careful with their daughters in Iowa, eh, Ed?” asked Mel.

“Damn, look at one of those gals and you end up in jail! It was easier to get into law school than to get a date with my wife. I had to submit more forms, some in triplicate!”

Everybody laughed. Hollis could be funny.

Despite the heavy weapons they carried and the prospect of killing at any moment, the four were in a good mood, maybe happy to be out of the Chicago Office pressure cooker, and Mel, freed from the awkwardness of his situation, was especially relaxed, as he probably saw this as a way to get back in the Director’s good graces. At the same time, he had no problem deferring the tactical issues to Charles.

“Where is that damned boy?” wondered Mel. “You’d think he’d have sense to know the jig was up by now, get tired of sleeping in mud and begging for sandwiches from farmers’ wives, and turn himself in, if only for the hot food.”

“He’s not what you call blessed in the brain department,” said Ed. “But, about now, he’s probably figured out it’s over.”

“That ain’t how their minds work,” said Charles, looking intently out the window as trees and small hills covered in pasture grass rolled by. “They always think they can get away with it. They just don’t believe in no odds, and they don’t learn no lessons. They’re just as stubborn as they are stupid.”

“Farm ahead,” noted McKee. “Maybe he’s on lunch break again.”

“He sure does like to eat, doesn’t he?” said Mel. “I never met a hungrier bank— Hey!”

They all saw it. The farmhouse was on the right, behind a mailbox with the name CONKLE painted on it, and the farm’s standard features included auxiliary structures — a barn, sheds, silo, and corncrib — and a car had just lurched to a rough halt on its journey out, then jerked backwards, in a rush, behind the corncrib, which, loaded to the brim with cobs, offered concealment from the road.

“Oh, boy,” said Mel, “another brilliant move by Pretty Boy. Don’t keep driving, as if it’s a normal trip. No, halt and pull back. Make sure we notice.”

Hollis stopped the car, and the four agents peeled out, as Purvis gave a hands-up halt signal to the trailing vehicle and indicated with the same crude gesture that the four East Liverpool officers should move in on the oblique rather than going straight up the gut as he and his agents were about to do. The four men in blue got out, all with lever-actions or pump guns, and began their circle around toward the back of the farmhouse.

On the crouch, the other three agents began to close in on the vehicle behind the corncrib. The next sound was pumps gliding back, then being slammed forward, primed for firing. Charles went alone on the right. He didn’t need help because he held the Thompson locked against his shoulder, but downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing was a beast, especially with the flair of the drum guaranteeing extreme awkwardness, but it was otherwise so brilliantly designed that all the weight seemed to pull it toward the target, and you couldn’t heft it without feeling that near-gravitational force yank it toward the act of shooting. He’d checked the bolt — back — and with his thumb felt that the safety was off and the fire selector set on full automatic.

It was a sunny afternoon, twilight just coming on, the air crisp and biting, a brisk north wind pushing down from the higher latitudes, chilling all in its path, yet aside from the rush as it poured across the land, not a sound could be heard anywhere. It was a good day for killing, as fall seems to stir the blood for the hunt.

When Ed and Sam seemed to have almost completed the circumference of the corncrib but hadn’t quite come into the open to face the car, they looked to Mel, a little behind, who nodded and then yelled, “Floyd, Justice Department! Give yourself up. We’re heavily armed and we will shoot!”

Another moment of silence, and Charles, on the right, eased forward just a bit, edging around the wire cage jammed with the corncobs, drying out to make winter feed for the Conkle cattle. The old car eased into view, and he could see two men in it. The door opened, one of them, in overcoat and hat, spilled out, a heavyset guy in his thirties, with a square face with a look of bitter determination on it. It was clearly Pretty Boy, but Charles held fire, as it was still possible his hands might fly up. And even if they didn’t, there was that fellow still in the car a little too close for comfort.

Floyd appeared to study the issue for about a tenth of a second, then dipped, spun, and took off. He raced across the front yard, through an orchard of apple trees, and Charles’s companions opened up with shotgun and automatic pistol, blowing the hell out of the low-hanging branches, so that they disintegrated into a spray of twigs, sprigs, dry russet leaves, and chunks of fruit, a sudden blizzard accompanied by the roar of the guns. Yet Floyd scampered through this inclement element without missing a step, as he in fact found a surge of power in himself, knowing that he could easily outrun the range of the shotgun or the pistol, and he ran like hell.

He took off at a diagonal into the field behind the farmhouse, his obvious goal another line of trees a hundred yards away. Head down, his strong legs attacking the turf like a running back’s, his arms clawing in rhythm against the atmosphere, his shoulders bobbing and weaving to that same rhythm, he made astonishing headway, opening up the distance in seconds.