Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Les and J.P. laughed, though Helen felt a little squeamish laughing at the death of the federal officer, as she didn’t share Les’s rage at such men. If they had to die, they had to die, that was the bargain, but it was somehow wrong getting all sis-boom-bah about it.

“Les,” she said, “let the poor man rest in peace.”

“Come on, Helen,” said Les, “I made him famous. And since he’s a Justice Department guy, he should be glad he died for justice — my justice on Phil D’Abruzzio — instead of a lousy bank job or—”

Where did it come from? It was suddenly just there, beside them, angling in at their speed and clipping the fender hard. Les raised his head, as Helen screamed and J.P. fought the wheel for control, and saw a large dark car boring against theirs.

In the next second, the phantom had forced them off the road into a field, dark and immense, where J.P. hit the brakes to keep from spinning out of control, the car skidding as the locked wheels failed to bite into the loam, the car rocking, sliding, grinding, Les banging his head on the seat in front of him, Helen screaming again, the whole universe suddenly gone screwball, as nothing made any sense at all.

They came to rest a few dozen feet off of Willow Road, the intercepting vehicle angled ahead of them. At that point, its driver flicked on his own lights, so that his double beams cut into the Hudson’s double beams, and the area suddenly came alive in the glow of the illumination.

“Are you all right?” J.P. said.

“Take the machino!” responded Les, sitting upright, lifting the Thompson from the floor with a single arm and trying to get it over the seat to J.P. But he hadn’t the strength, even if it was the lightest of the two weapons available, and it fell back to the floor. His hand squirted to his .45 in the shoulder holster, as J.P. also went to pluck his pistol from concealment.

The door of the other car opened and a man stepped around it and into the light.

It was the G-Man. He had a Thompson.

THE OUACHITAS

ARKANSAS

The present

“All right,” said Bob, “he’s there. I didn’t see any run.”

“Maybe it’s in the next chapter,” said Rawley.

Bob regarded him harshly, but such was Rawley’s intense sense of Grumley self-adoration, it made not a dent in the man’s smirk.

“I’m just trying to make you aware of what’s in the air,” he said. “I don’t want you feeling bushwhacked and getting all disappointed. Maybe Swagger, disappointed, doesn’t keep his word.”

“I’ll keep my word,” said Bob.

“But maybe I won’t keep mine,” said Nick.

“That fellow,” yelled Braxton from his seat on the edge of the hole, “bears watching. You keep your eye on him, brother.”

“I will, brother,” yelled Rawley back at him. Then, turning to Bob, he said, “So Charles has finally caught up with Baby Face. What happens next, do you suppose, sniper?”

“I’d say death in a hat comes to call on Mr. Lester J. Gillis,” said Bob.

WILLOW ROAD

NORTHFIELD, ILLINOIS

November 27, 1934

Full moon, but not yet risen off the horizon. Orange, maybe umber, throwing its thin hue across the known world. A cold and blustery evening. An empty field in a farm town in a Midwest as flat as the Atlantic when calm. Otherwise, not much information: no traffic, no lights, no sign of civilization. Wind rushing through the high, dry grass, the stalks rubbing and whispering against one another. A vault of stars across the sky, pinwheels and whirligigs and clouds of light a billion miles away. The intersecting beams of the headlamps of the two twisted cars throwing an odd lattice of brightness across the land, illuminating the still-settling dust.

They watched him come. Tall man, low fedora, open topcoat, white shirt, black tie. Gunman. Face grim, sunken, maybe cadaverous, but those eyes! Dark and mournful and without flutter or tremor: blinkless. He moved with panther grace, big hands loose and ready on the submachine gun. He stared hard at them, hard enough to melt the glass through which they saw him.

“We both draw and fire,” said J.P. “Helen, you get down and—”

“No, my arm is pinned behind Helen and you aren’t fast enough. Hold steady, hear him out.”

The agent opened the passenger door.

“Hands on wheel, Chase,” he said. “If I see them move, I’ll part your haircut with hardball.”

J.P. swallowed. It did not occur to him to defy.

“You,” he said to Les. “Out here, little man. You and I have business.”

“He can’t walk, sir,” said Helen. “His legs are shot up.”

“Then I will kill him where he sits,” said the agent.

“My legs are okay,” said Les. “And I’m not afraid. If it’s a gunfight you want, mister, you have knocked on the right door. I fear no man and back down from no man.”

The agent stepped away, insolently turned his back, daring them to shoot. They would not — they could not — for they all believed that among his talents would be seeing behind himself.

“Still got the steel vest, Les?” asked J.P. in a whisper, having not moved his head, his hair, or his hands.

Bonk, came the answer, as Les slid over the Monitor, hooked the Thompson, and removed himself from the car. The first weight of his body and all that steel against his legs produced fifteen jets of pain that made him wince and cave, but he steadied himself on the car door, took a step, and then another, and found the pain at first bearable and then forgettable. He moved out twenty feet and faced his opponent.

“You cut that steel loose or I will put one between your eyes and turn your friends to Swiss cheese,” said the agent.

Hell! How did he know?

Les set the gun down in the grass, reached into his jacket, and unbuckled the two supporting straps. As the second one went, the two pieces of steel fell to the ground and then toppled flat to earth.

“Les!” screamed Helen.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” said Les, eyes riveted on the G-man, “this boy wants to play with the machino. No man in this world can take me on the machino.”

He picked the Thompson up, easily hefting it to his midline, where it rested in the familiarity of his two hands.

“You say we have business, sir?”

“I am Charles Swagger, Special Agent, Department of Justice,” said the man. “I hearby place you under arrest for multiple outstanding felony warrants, including first-degree murder this afternoon, against federal agents in Barrington, Illinois, those warrants forthcoming. I order you to surrender your weapon and raise your hands or prepare to face the consequences.”

“I am Lester J. Gillis, wrongly called ‘Baby Face’ by the newpapers, and you will have to take me the hard way,” said Les.

Two men, thirty feet apart. Each cranked a bit, quartering himself with respect to the other, with the Thompson gun on the diagonal across his body. They held still, each exploring the other’s face and body, reading what data the smear of lights from moon and headlights permitted, reading the position of the hands, the set of the chin in the jaw, the narrowness of the eyes, the tension, or absence of same, in the muscles of the face. Another second passed as the face-off approached — first, anticlimax; then farce, or even parody; and then—

Moon, wind, chill.

Les was fast as a burning cat. In pure blur he leveraged the big gun up and his talented eyes read the line that extended from back sight to front sight to target, calculating angles and muscle energy, graceful as any skeet champion, matador, or épée artist, a man with a true gift for the gun, all reflexes and experience that no instrument yet devised could measure, and he felt his finger find and caress the trigger straight back so there’d be no torque and the gun would hold true to the intentions of its shooter but—