Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Hermanson was, among other enterprises, the Slots King of Wentworth County, who’d opened the place to the gangster trade. Most of the boys, going on back to Big Al, had logged vacation time there, including Les and J.P. Hobart had big-city aspirations in a small town, and had a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition, serviced by none other than Jimmy Murray. Hobart always had a welcome for the profession; he enjoyed the excitement of hanging around with the big-time rollers.

As they pulled in, a guy in a suit came out onto the porch of Hobart’s house and watched them approach. They waved, the guy on the porch waved back, and Les looked at the man and, rolling down the window, asked, all friendly-like, “Hey, is Eddie around?” meaning Hobart’s gofer, Eddie Duffy, and the guy’s face locked up hard.

Then Les saw that he looked straight at the man who’d tried to kill him off Wolf Road and whom he’d tried to kill off Wolf Road.

Angular face, eyes hidden under a low fedora, a grim jot of mouth, in a dark suit like a funeral director’s. He had FEDERAL written all over him in letters two feet tall. The two faced each other for a second that lasted a decade, as each tried to wrap a brain around what was going on.

“You sonovabitch!” screamed Les, reaching for his .45.

After Uncle Phil’s message, things again happened fast. The next day, Sam, Charles, and several other agents took two cars to the Lake Como Inn. They reconned the place, made drawings, calculated fields of fire, places for cover, methods of locking off the complex once the prey was in the trap.

Two days later, Hobart Hermanson himself showed up at headquarters in Chicago. He figured which way the wind was blowing and he didn’t want to be on the wrong side in the Baby Face drama upcoming. He volunteered what he knew, told the agents he’d clear his people out so there’d be no civilians to worry about in the field of fire — Little Bohemia, anyone? Cowley made another trek up as the week progressed to see how preparations were going. He left Charles and two other men as early preparation, though Nelson wasn’t expected for another two days.

The agents took over Hermanson’s house, and kept a steady lookout, but on the third day, the twenty-seventh, they were running out of food, so the other agents, Metcalf and MacRae, went out to get supplies. They took Charles’s car, which he’d driven up in with Sam. Meanwhile, the Division car was parked around back, but, as it turned out, Metcalf had taken the keys with him on the shopping trip.

Charles sat in the front room, his pistol in his shoulder holster, but all the heavy weapons — two Thompsons and a BAR — were stored upstairs out of sight in case visitors dropped by. There was nothing particular to do except worry and hope, and he was doing both when he heard a car drive in. Had to be Metcalf and MacRae coming back from the grocery store. He thought he ought to help with the provisions, as he’d always hated the kind of officer who ran things but never pitched in.

He got up and pulled on his hat and ambled out.

It was about 2 p.m., the temperature about 45, a wan sun pushing half its light through high clouds, no blue anywhere in sight. No wind, as the pines were still and the empty elms and maples didn’t rattle in a breeze.

He smiled, noting immediately it wasn’t his Pontiac but a V-8 Ford, shiny black, as if just off the lot, and he wondered if someone had tipped the local cops, who’d come by for a look-see or a pitch-in, or maybe even some tourist or a friend of Hermanson’s. Through the windows of the car, he noticed the fellow on the passenger side waving, and he waved back, trying to put a smile on his face, though such an enterprise was always difficult for him, and as the car pulled to a halt, he watched the window roll down and the fellow, square-faced, youngish rather than oldish, oddly familiar, with hat low at his brow — a homberg, no less! — said, “Hey, is Eddie around?”

That was the instant Charles recognized him as Baby Face Nelson and the instant Baby Face recognized him as federal.

“You sonovabitch!” screamed Nelson, twisting as he went for his shoulder holster.

Charles beat him cold and had a mere six ounces left of trigger before his pistol fired, but Nelson had vanished.

Whoever was driving was quicker than either of them and punched the accelerator, and the V-8 took off like an Indy racer, throwing up a screeen of raw dirt that furled and flapped about Charles, and by the time he’d dropped to a kneeling position for a solid long shot, the car was too far away, and, not being an amateur, he had no call to waste hardball on phantoms. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the plate and read it: Illinois 639578.

It vanished in the next second.

Charles shook his head clear, turned to run to the Division car parked behind Hermanson’s, remembered that Metcalf had the keys, and realized he was frozen in place and time. And history.

Goddammit!

The rage and frustration broke like a falling wall in a six-alarm blaze, engulfing him, and he felt his whole body jack with fury and regret. If he’d made the recognition a half a second earlier, Baby Face might be gone, but he’d be wearing a hardball where his left eye used to be. A half a dozen other scenarios unreeled before Charles’s eyes in which, by this or that fraction or twitch or fate or zephyr of whimsy, Baby Face was in his gunsight one second earlier.

But it hadn’t happened. Baby Face was gone, and Charles could do nothing but watch the dust settle in the air from his roaring getaway.

Where were Metcalf and MacRae? Time seemed to coagulate in an ugly wound and would not advance. The world stood atomically still, with nothing moving anywhere except the last layers of dust that finally floated to its reunion with the road, and Charles put his full force of will into getting Metcalf and MacRae back — suppose they’d stopped for coffee? — so he could get on with the chase. But time, to say nothing of Metcalf and MacRae, refused to cooperate, and he was trapped there in a nightmare of frozen-solid paralysis.

“Goddammit!” howled Les. “I had him. I had the edge on that G-Man! I was going to put a slug into the sonovabitch.”

“Les, sure. But maybe there were ten more guys with Thompsons and Brownings in there, and you pop that guy and they hose us down like Bonnie and Clyde,” said J.P., hunched over the wheel, having roared down the road to U.S. 14 and cranked left to take them through the town of Lake Geneva.

“J.P.’s right, honey,” said Helen from the backseat. “You don’t know what was in there. It could have been curtains for us.”

That they were right — that J.P. had probably saved his life, that his plan was working, that the future as he had forecast lay perfectly ahead — did nothing to mollify Les. He wasn’t constructed that way, though he managed to get it through the vortex of red screaming rage that filled his brain that he should not yell at his wife and his closest friend.

Instead, he sat there and sunk into himself. He took on himself all the rage and frustration he felt, somehow distilled it into pure bravado, feeling it leak through his bones and his organs to his gut and, there, alchemize into something monstrous. It was the urge to destroy as pure as he’d ever felt it, to reach out and, in the infantile core of his mind, simply crush any and all in front of him until his ego was the only structure left in the world. He would, if he could, destroy the world, and if he went along with it, as it perished in cinders and grit, that didn’t particularly upset him. He felt Nietzsche’s pure happiness of the knife.

They got beyond Lake Geneva and in twenty minutes were into Illinois, on the straightaway that was Northwest Highway to Chicago.