Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Sam placed his hand on the two heavy weapons to secure them, to hold them still, to keep them from bouncing. He tried to think of something to say but came up with nothing. Though technically in command, he was well aware that Ed Hollis had been blooded at Little Bohemia and was Charles’s co-shooter on the Dillinger kill.

He looked over, took some pleasure in the young man’s calm visage and straight-ahead concentration on the driving issues before him. Ed betrayed no symptoms of fear; he didn’t appear to be breathing hard, he wasn’t abnormally blanched of color, he wasn’t licking conspicuously dry lips.

Fine, being paired with a solid guy like Hollis was a great break for Sam, whose insides trembled at the thought of what could lie ahead. He tried to order his heart to beat more slowly, his breathing to lose its rawness, his mouth to moisten. The body would not listen to his mind.

Think of the guns, he thought. Think of what Charles said. You concentrate on the gun, the shooting, that clears your mind of fear and you are able to operate. He tried to imagine looking over the flat receiver of the Remington and pulling the trigger, feeling the hard bark of the gun against his shoulder, and seeing the man of his many nightmares stagger backwards and drop. But the image disappeared and was replaced by another, of himself pulling the same trigger and nothing happening and him struggling, banging it, pushing levers and pulling cranks, trying to get it to work, while Baby Face Nelson, laughing, walked closer and closer…

“There,” said Hollis.

Sam looked at what was indeed a shiny black V-8 in the other lane, across the median, and his eyes locked on the license as his hand clenched the barrel of one of the guns.

Illinois 556091.

He breathed an involuntary sigh of relief.

“Close, but no luck,” said Hollis.

Sam said nothing. He wanted it to be Baby Face; he didn’t want it to be Baby Face. He wanted it to be now; he wanted it to be never. He wanted it to be finished; he wanted it to never start.

He laughed. Manhunts were such a trite, pulp thing, and yet here in life, as in pulp, the ending was the same. The head man hunter faced the quarry, gun to gun, face-to-face. It never happened that way except in pulp! In life, the boss was usually far away in an office or a thousand miles away in a capital city! Yet somehow this boss had ended up in this car with this riot gun.

They ran into some traffic as they hit a jog in the road just outside of Barrington; that little bedroom village contributed more than its share of cars to the traffic stream, and the two agents eyeballed each one, their car going the opposite direction, feeling both frustration and relief as each passing car turned out to be innocent.

Beyond Barrington, the traffic again thinned, and a sign announced that FOX RIVER GROVE would be next, six miles farther down. The land was flat, gone to thatch, the trees skeletal in late fall, the weather gray and chilly, at 40 degrees just cold enough to produce vapor from breathing to smear the windshield. Ahead, a single car came toward them. Yes, it was black. Yes, it was shiny. Yes—

“It’s them,” Hollis said.

Sam caught the first three numbers of the plate before the angle of passage took the view away: 639—

The cars passed, Sam turned, craning to verify the plate, and saw the last three: —578.

With a calm that surprised even himself, he said, “Okay, Ed, get us across the median and we’ll close on him.”

Without thinking, he took up the Thompson.

“Okay,” said Les, eyeing his rearview, “I got a guy coming around on us.”

He watched in the mirror as a heavy, dark vehicle raised dust as it bounced across the median, and, in profile, the car he made out was a dark Hudson. It hit the pavement, rammed its way through a hard left, and began to come after them.

“He’s Division,” Les said. “That’s what they drive.”

“Oh, hell,” said J.P.

“I wonder how he got on us?” said Les.

“Les, I’m scared,” said Helen.

“Honey, it’s nothing,” said Les. “We’ll let him get close, then J.P. will give him a squirt with the Colt rifle in the hood and blow out his engine and he’ll be dumped way out here with no way to call headquarters. We’ll get off this big road and zip into Evanston and lay up. Tomorrow, we’ll get a new set of wheels and go on with the plan. It’s nothing. J.P., you get that thing ready. Honey, get down on the floor, just to stay out of the way.”

His voice was falsely chipper, and he watched as whoever was behind the wheel of the Division car leaned on the pedal, and it seemed to go from very far away to damned close in a single second.

Beside him, J.P. leaned over the seat and pulled the Colt Monitor over the obstacle of the seat back and oriented it toward the back window, nesting it against his shoulder, his forearm on the seat back, lowering his eye to the sights, exactly when Helen slithered to the floor.

He could feel J.P. squirming, adjusting, fiddling with the heavy rifle, cocking it, checking the mag, trying to get comfortable in what was admittedly a tough position from which to shoot well off his knees on the seat, against the sway and jiggle and roar of the car. Still, J.P.’s clumsiness with the task deeply annoyed Les and he wished he’d been on the gun, J.P. driving, because he was such a better shot and so much more effective in action.

“Have you got him yet?”

“This car’s bouncing, that car’s bouncing, the gun’s bouncing, I’m bouncing, the whole world is bouncing. Maybe if you slowed down a little bit.”

“He’ll be by us if I slow down, and he’ll have shots into us and we won’t have a thing to throw back. Goddammit, hit him. Hit him!”

J.P. fired a short burst, insanely loud in the confines of the car, the smell of burning powder and the spew of flecks and debris, driven by the fury of gas bleed-off, as well as the hot-as-hell spent shells pitching into the Ford’s cabin, one scorching shell hitting Les in the bare neck and making him flinch.

He saw the Hudson evade left, out of the line of fire, through the galaxies of crack and puncture of the back window.

“Did I hit him? I had him good!”

“He’s still coming, he’s around on us, trying to get into the blind spot. I’m gunning it. Get ready to fire again.”

Les punched it hard, felt the small car buck ahead and put a few feet of distance between his vehicle and the government men’s, which brought the Hudson back into J.P.’s field, and he squeezed off another short burst, repeating the drama of the heavy weapon firing in the confines of the small cabin.

“Goddammit, I thought I had him.”

“He’s still there. The guy’s got a machino!”

Les punched again, spurting ahead, just as the rip of the Thompson announced that a squad of hardball had been launched. One or two of the five or six seemed to hit the Ford, announcing their arrival with a smack of rending metal upon penetration, and a shiver of vibration, but most of the rounds blazed off in the direction of Barrington.

“Go for the windshield,” Les screamed. “Kill these bastards!”

It was so hard. The gun was moving, the car was moving, dust filled the air, and Sam tried to hold the wedge of the front sight on the wavering image of the Ford a few dozen feet ahead, also roaring along at seventy-five miles per, but it was a total universe of swerve and jounce and tremble and shudder, the blur of the world, and even as he fired, he knew a rogue lurch had taken the sight off the target and, by the time he’d stopped shooting, he was staring at empty space above the Ford’s roof.

“Dammit!” he screamed to nobody.

The gun was so heavy, and he was resting the drum on the sill, trying to pivot with the wanderings of the two cars in the hot, blurry world of seventy-five miles per hour, but it was all but impossible. He pulled both grips tight against him, drawing the weapon hard to his shoulder, even as his back was in a strange twist in defiance of anatomical regularity, driving a pain into him, but as the car seemed to go calm for just a second. He had it, he was there, at about forty-five degrees to it, and he fired three and knew that two of them had blown blisters in the hood. Then the fragile relationship of car to car shattered in the random swerves of the chase and the Ford spurted ahead again, out of position for him to pivot the muzzle on it.