Hot Springs (24 page)

“Roger on that, Earl.”

“Be careful. Short burst. You ought to be able to bust him with three. Don’t let the gun get away from you.”

“It won’t happen.”

“You other two units, you are set. This whole damned thing turns on how fast you git through that back door.”

“Yes sir. We are ready.”

“Okay, you fellas, you do yourselves proud now, y’hear?”

“Yes sir.”

Earl felt like a cigarette. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:57. He flicked a Lucky out, lit it up, took a deep breath and felt good about the thing. What could be done had been done. It was clear there would be some surprises for the Grumley boys.

He slipped out the door of his car, letting it stay ajar, and headed back to the trunk. He popped it. Inside lay his vest and a 1918 Al Browning Automatic Rifle.

Fuck the vest. He was way down here where there was no shooting. He didn’t need the vest.

He took the Browning, slid a twenty-round mag into the well, snapped it in and threw the bolt to seat a round. Then he pulled out a bandolier with ten more magazines for the gun and withdrew four magazines, which he put in his suit coat pockets, two in each for balance. He threw the bandolier back inside and closed the trunk gently.

But he could not help thinking: What is wrong? What have I forgotten? Am I in the right place? How soon will medical aid arrive? Will this work?

But then it settled down to one thing: What is wrong?

The call came from upstairs. It was Nathan Grumley, behind the big German gun, which was mounted on its sled mount just at the head of the stairs, with its belts of ammo all flowing into it.

“Jape, you see anything?”

“Not a goddamned thing ‘cept these here fat niggers,” Jape called back. He sat alone at a table in the bar. Around him, the slots were unused. The place was practically empty but three boys had bumbled in and he had directed that they stand nonchalantly at the bar. If they didn’t want to, he suggested they have a talk with his uncle, at which point he pulled back his jacket which lay crumpled on the chair next to him and revealed the muzzle of his tommy gun. All complied, though one wet up his pants when he saw the gun.

By a clock on the wall Jape could see that it was virtually 10:00. He took another sip on the bourbon, warmed by its strength, finding courage in it. He was a little nervous. The cut-face nigger was behind the bar, looking spooked as shit. Good thing he’d gone behind the bar and cleaned out the baseball bat, the sawed-off Greener and the old Civil War saber like his grandpap might well have carried.

Then, precisely at ten, a car pulled up, its lights off. Jape reached over and slid the Thompson out from under the coat, shucking the coat to the floor. The gun came over until he held it just under the table, ever so slightly scutding his chair back. He could see some confusion out by the car, but it was dark and he wasn’t sure what to do.

“You niggers stay where you is!” he commanded. “Nathan, I think they’re here, goddammit.”

The sound of the big bolt on the German gun being cranked was Nathan’s response.

“We gonna jambalaya some boys!” Jape crooned to the terrified black men.

“I don’t want to die,” came a gal’s voice from upstairs, high-pitched and warbly. “Please, sirs, don’t you be hurtin’ me.”

“Shut up, ‘ho,” came the response.

The raid team broke from the car and headed toward Mary Jane’s.

Jape’s fingers flew toward the safety of the gun, and pushed it off. By Jesus, he was ready.

Everything was lovely. Two State Police were bodyguards and there were a lot of guns in the room, carried by veterans who’d waded ashore at Anzio and Normandy and suchlike, so at last Fred Becker felt safe and among friends. He was able to put aside that gnawing tension that was his closest companion through all this mess.

He was meeting with his group of reformers, all men like himself, at Coy’s Steakhouse, on a hill just beneath Hot Springs Mountain on the east side of the city. Three national correspondents and a photographer from Life were in the room too.

But the circumstances were only nominally political. The young men were here to celebrate Fred’s success and what it would mean for them all, as they foresaw their own cooption of the levers of power in the Democratic party in the next election, and their eventual takeover of the city on a thrust of righteous indignation. For Fred and his raiders had given the town hope and loosened the grip of the old power brokers. One could feel it in the air, the sudden burgeoning spring of optimism, the sense that if people only stood up things didn’t have to stay as they always did, locked in the hard old patterns of corruption and vice and violence.

All the wives were there. It was a grand evening. It was as if the war had been won, or at least the light at the end of the tunnel glimpsed. Toasts were made, glasses raised, people almost broke into song. It was one of those rare nights of pure bliss.

Then a shadow fell across the table. He looked up to see the long, sad face of D. A. Parker.

“Mr. Becker?”

“Yes?”

“I think you’d best come with me. The boys are working tonight and you’re going to be needed down there.”

“What? You said—”

“You remember I asked you to make that call yesterday concerning a place on Malvern Avenue. We used that to set up an opportunity that looked very promising,” said D. A., hoping to cut off the tirade that accompanied Becker’s instruction in any raid plans that masked the prosecuting attorney’s deep ambivalence about the use of force and his own physical fear, which was immense.

Fred rose.

“Folks,” he said, “honey,” acknowledging his wife, “I’ve got to run. There’s work to be done and—”

At that moment came the sound of gunfire. Machine-gun fire. It rattled through the night, a liquefied rip familiar to each man who’d served in a war zone. It could be no other sound. If you’ve heard it once you know it forever.

Fred’s face went bloodless.

“Sounds like the boys are doing fine,” said D. A.

What is wrong?

He didn’t know. But some weird vibration of distress hummed in his ear. Something somehow was wrong.

Two cars, lights dimmed, pulled down the alley, passing him, coming to rest at the rear of Mary Jane’s. Silently, the doors sprang open, and eight members of the rear-entry team got out, cumbersome in their vests with their awkward weapons. Without noise they assembled into a stick as Slim led them to the door, a shotgun out before him and aimed at the knob. Except for a scuffle of feet and the breathing of the men, muted but still insistent, it was quiet.

What is wrong?

Then he knew.

They would know we’d also come in the rear because that’s our signature. We go in multiple entrances simultaneously. We swarm in: that’s D. A.’s best trick. Therefore, knowing that, they will have to ambush us from the rear.

But how?

There’s no room to fire from the building at men this close and there’s no sign of men moving in on them. The alley had been entirely deserted this whole time: only Japanese Marines could hide so silently.

Then Earl knew where they’d be.

They’d be down the block. He recalled a truck parked there, on a cross street, a good two hundred feet ahead, and he instantly diverted his gaze down the alley, trying to see through the dark.

Suddenly from the front, the sound of guns firing angrily, long bursts chewing the night apart, bullets blowing into wood and glass.

Then Earl saw movement in the dark. He couldn’t make it out clearly: just a sense of movement as one darker shade of blackness moved twenty-five feet and planted itself directly across the alley exit to a cross street half a block down.

He waited, forcing his concentration against the subdy differing shades of blackness.

He thought he saw something squirm and believed it to be a tarpaulin being pulled back to reveal men hunched over the lip of the truck bed, as if settling in to aim.

Earl fired: the BAR chopped through its first magazine in less than two seconds, and far off he saw over the jarring sights the flashes and puffs as his bullets jacked into something metallic, possibly a truck, lifting dust and sparks from it. He slapped a new magazine in fast, and fired another long burst into it, holding the rounds into it, watching them strike and skip off. A shot, then a second, came from the truck bed, and then somehow a gas tank went, lighting up the night in a roiling orange spume and in its concussive force lifting the truck ever so slightly and setting it down. A man in flames with a Thompson gun ran from it, dropped the gun and fell to the alleyway.

Earl looked back to Mary Jane’s to see the last of the rear-entry team race into the place.

The car pulled up out front.

They were so tense their breaths came in dry spurts, like rasps scraping over a washbucket.

“Okay,” said Stretch, just barely in command, “you know the drill. Let’s go. Peanut, you’re on the big gun.”

“Gotcha,” said Peanut, sliding down behind the fender of the car, raising his Thompson as he fingered off the safety, and checked with the same finger to make certain the fire selector was ratcheted toward full auto. His front sight bobbed and weaved but then stabilized and came to rest on the man slouching at the table in the barroom.

The three remaining men, their loads in their hands, charged up the walk to the storefront. It wasn’t far, maybe twenty-five feet. They kicked open the door and screamed “Raid! Raid! Get your hands up!

Jape saw the door open, goddamn! and was so excited he thought he’d piss up his pants. He kicked the table away to brace the Thompson against his hip, feeling his hand curve over the huge hundred-round drum to grab the fore grip and hold it tight.

“Raid! RaidJ” came the shouts, and as he raised the weapon he had the consciousness of glass or something breaking and it was as if he were being mauled by a lion who leaped at him from nowhere, and from that sensation there came the sensation of drowning, sinking, falling, all of it toward fatigue and ultimately sleep in darkness.

The three at the door were not aware that behind them Peanut had fired, bringing down the barroom gunman with one perfecdy placed burst. They were themselves unarmed, except for handguns still holstered. What they carried, two apiece, were buckets half filled with screws, stones, pieces of broken glass and scrap wood, and quickly, each lobbed his burden, one then the other, into the bar to the stairway, where the buckets hit, and emptied their contents in a rattle of things scraping and clanking and falling and crashing. It was no substitute for the sound of human feet in a normal world, but in the superheated one of house combat—gunshots now came from behind too, for some odd reason—it was enough to confuse the gunner upstairs, who now fired.

Nathan, the prison-hardened Murfreesboro Grumley behind the weapon, simply kept the butterfly trigger depressed. The gun, mounted on a securely heavy sled tripod, fired for about two minutes, and it poured down such a hail of 8-mm fire that the floor which absorbed it shattered, while broken flooring nails flipped through the air, amid the clouds of other debris that flew. The gun was so terrifying that D. A.’s plan simply fell apart.

The front-entry team retreated hastily to its car and took up cowering positions. The rear-entry team, all eight men including Frenchy and Carlo, collected in a choke point just out of the beaten zone, unable to think, talk, signal or otherwise function intelligently in the rawness and the hugeness of the sound. Courage was beyond the question; it was meaningless in the face of such a volume of fire, and the men looked at each other bug-eyed and confused. They needed a leader and he didn’t get there for another thirty seconds, though without his vest and with a BAR.

“Get back1” Earl screamed, for he knew that the gunner would soon see he was firing at nothing and would swing fire.

They scuttled backward, and in the next second, the gunner de-ratcheted his gun from the sled tripod, swung it radically to the right and sent another eight hundred rounds through the wall into the hallway where until that second the men had been.

The gunfire atomized the thin plaster and wood wall that separated the stairwell from the hallway. Dust and chips flew; the air filled with poisonous brew.

Earl waited now until he heard a clink.

That meant a belt had rim out and he heard crankings and clankings as Nathan attempted to speed-change to a new belt. But instead of racing out, Earl merely scrunched along the now blasted hallway, raised his BAR along the same axis the bullets had just traveled, and fired an entire magazine upward through the shattered wall of Mary Jane’s.

He rammed another magazine in, fired it in a flash. Then he slithered around the stairwell and looked upward. He could see nothing in the floating smoke and plaster and wood powder.

An odd noise came to his ears. He tried to identify it but his ears rang so from all the firing that it took a second or two. Then he had it: it was a steady drip… drip … drip.

Earl looked and saw—blood. It coagulated on the top of the stairway, paused, then dripped down, drop by drop by heavy drop, until a tide overtook the individual drops and began to drain off the top of the stairs in a jagged track.

“Hey, up there,” he called. “This don’t have to go on. Ain’t no lawmen hurt yet nor no citizens. Y’all throw your guns down and come on out.”

He thought he heard the scurrying of men, a hushed argument.

As he crouched there, the blood rolled down the steps with more force, and to his left and right raiders came to flank him, setting up good shooting positions.

The silence wore on, but then they heard what sounded like shuffling.

“Get ready,” whispered Earl.

They could track the shuffling down the hallway until at last a figure emerged. It was a Negro girl, about twenty, in a slip and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her face was swollen, her eyes red and huge. She clutched herself with her arms. Her lips trembled. She seemed shaky on her heels.

“You be careful, missy,” Earl said. “You come on down and you’ll be all right. We don’t mean to hurt you or your friends none.”