Hot Springs (44 page)

Frenchy was busy doing something his training would teach him was utterly poindess. He was justifying.

It’s not my fault, he was saying to himself. They betrayed me. They did it to me first. They should have fought harder for me. Goddamn that Earl, goddamn him to hell: he knew how good I was and he knew it wasn’t my fault I stumbled in the middle of a gunfight and after all I was the one who made everybody look good when I got those two bank robbers who I know were trying to move on me and would have killed me and maybe the whole raid team if I hadn’t’ve stopped them.

His was the gift of self-conviction. In a little while he had reconstructed the past. This new version was much better. In it, he was the secret hero of the team. All the fellas looked up to him. He led all the raids. He got the two bank robbers. But Earl and D. A. were jealous of his success, of his natural heroic style and his oinning and nerve. After all, he had found the Central Book. So they had to defeat him, destroy him, ruin his chances. The old and the corrupt always tried to destroy the fresh, the energetic, the talented. It happened all the time. It wasn’t his fault.

The more he thought about it, the better he felt.

“Anything?” whispered Owney.

He crouched next to Johnny on the flatcar, and crouched behind them, guarding the delicate umbilical between the carbine and the light source, was Ding-Dong.

“I think they’re there. I heard something. But I can’t see anything yet,” Johnny responded.

The only sound was the odd tinkle of running water, as if someone somewhere had left a faucet running. The smell of kerosene, oil and coal filled the air, making it unpleasant to breathe. Odd noises came: the scuttling of rats or possibly hoboes, the movement of yard bulls on their rounds, the clanks as brakemen greased up the journal boxes over the axles. But here, in the center of the yard, it was surprisingly clear: the coaling and watering docks were farther out, on the outskirts.

Johnny Spanish watched through the green glow of the infrared scope. It was strange. The world had been turned inside out, almost like a photographic negative. light was dark and dark was light, with a crosshair superimposed.

He could see the switching shed, but there was no indication that anything was happening. Because he was looking into a lamp beam, the problem of shadow—though it was green, not black—was disconcerting. He wondered if he should have done more work on the scope, getting a better sense of what was going on in the glowing puzzle that was his night vision through the eyepiece. Could men move into his firing range and he not identify them as men?

No, not really. He could, after all, make out the shape and size of the switching house, could see the little dip behind it, could see the hard steel struts of the power wire pylons. There was no background, because the power of the lamp didn’t penetrate that far. He couldn’t see what wasn’t illuminated, which gave the universe a completely foreshortened perspective, as if the world were but 150 yards deep or so.

“Do you see—”

“Shut up, goddammit! Shut up and be still!” he commanded Owney, who was shaky.

Owney said nothing.

Then, far off, they heard the sound of a train approaching.

“It’s time,” Johnny whispered softly.

“Ding-dong,” said Ding-Dong Bell. “The party’s about to start.”

Crouched in the dark behind the switching shed, they watched as the train pulled into the yard. It looked like any other train, leaking steam, hissing, groaning, like some kind of large, complex animal. When it finally came to rest, it clanked, snapped, shivered and issued steam from a variety of orifices. A lot of the boxcars said JAX BEER but that meant nothing; trains were thrown together out of all kinds of cars, everybody knew.

In the center of the train there was one long, black car, with lights beaming through from little slots. It looked like some kind of armored car, the exact center of the contrivance, a dark, sealed, menacing blockhouse on wheels.

“That’s it,” whispered D. A. to Earl.

“Yeah,” he said.

It was nearly 2:00 in the morning. Before them for hours had been black nothingness, only the incongruous sound of water running from someplace close at hand, the stench of kerosene. A yard bull had come their way, carrying a lantern, but he was so unconcerned he simply looked into the shed, saw no hoboes hunkered there and moseyed on. But now at last, the train.

“Should we move in?” asked D. A.

“Nah. Wait for them to make a play. It don’t mean nothing if you move too early.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll check the boys.”

Earl separated from the old man, and slid almost on his hands and knees along the shallow embankment where each member of the team crouched, low and ready, each man locked in his own private drama.

“Okay?”

“All set, Mr. Earl. You give the signal.”

“It’ll be a bit yet, you just wait calmly.”

“I’m ready.”

He gave each man a tap on the shoulder, feeling their aliveness, their vitality. This was it. It would be over after tonight. They all knew it.

The last guy was Carlo.

“You okay?”

“Swell, Mr. Earl.”

“Your mama okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“You get the word from D. A.?”

“Yes sir. But I don’t like it much.”

“I don’t like it much neither but that’s what the man says. When the men move out, you head on over to that shed and join up with me. We’ll wait and see what happens.”

“I got it.”

“Good boy.”

Earl squirmed back to D. A.

“It’s not too late. I can lead ‘em. You can come in where you’re needed.”

“No, Earl. This is my party. I’ve earned this one.”

“Yes sir, but—”

Suddenly, a hundred-odd yards away, a door flew open, throwing a slash of light across the yard. There were two quick shots. Figures seemed to scurry back and forth in front of the dark car in the middle of the train, and men climbed in. Another shot sounded.

“Jesus,” said D. A.

“That’s it,” said Earl. “They’ve done made their move.”

“We should go now?”

“I’d give it a few more minutes. Let ‘em feel comfortable.”

“Yeah.”

The door slid closed, and the light went out. Time ticked by, nearly two minutes’ worth. Finally, D. A. said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“That’s good,” said Earl. “You want to be set up when they come out.”

Earl scampered down the line.

“Time to move out,” he whispered to each man, until he got to the end.

“Come on, Henderson.”

“Yes sir,” said Henderson.

The men scooched forward, then rose. D. A. was in the lead. Visibility was limited to maybe twenty-five yards at most, but they formed up in good order, a skirmish line with ten feet separating them.

D. A. moved to the center of the line, gave a wave that passed as a sort of signal, and they moved out, crouched, each with his .45 clasped in two hands in front of him, as they had been instructed.

Johnny saw them rise in the green murk.

“Okay,” he said.

He felt Owney tense with anticipation.

Now they came. Seven men, like soldiers in the Great War, bent double, moving cautiously across no-man’s-land. It reminded him of 1918 and the last big German attack, and the endless killer’s ecstasy he’d felt experiencing the delights of the Browning .30 water-cooled, watching the bullets flick out and unleash a storm wherever they struck and in that turbulence knocking the advancing men askew like tenpins, so many of them, and the hot pounding of the gun, the furious intensity of it all, the star shells detonating overhead. This infrared thing: it was his own private star shell.

He tried to pick out Earl. Earl will be in the lead. Earl would be heroic. But the instrument couldn’t resolve such details; he could only make out blurs moving with the sure, steady pace of human animation.

“Shoot ‘em,” hissed Owney as he watched the carbine barrel tracking ever so gently off Johnny’s hold, as the Irishman measured his shots.

But Johnny had nerves of tungsten. That’s why he did so well at this business. He let them come onward because he knew that after the first burst, the formation would scatter, and he’d have to track them and take the survivors down running. That meant the further they were from cover, the more time he’d have and the fewer who’d make it back to the switching shed.

He let them come on another minute. Then another. It had a curious, almost blasphemous intimacy to it. The men felt unobserved, he could tell, secure in their darkness. Now and then they’d halt and gently regroup and at odd moments in this process they’d strike poses so bored and languid and unselfconscious, it was as if he were observing them in the shower.

“Shoot, fer Chrissakes!” barked Owney, as the pressure of the stalk proved too heavy for his more brutal and direct style of gangstering.

“Now, now, boyo,” crooned Johnny, “just another bloody second. I think I’ve got the leader all picked out.”

It was the bigger fellow in the middle, a drooping, long-armed hulk of a man, who led the boys onward, a little ahead of them. That would be Earl, of course. He was so large. Odd that he’d be so large; the kid had never said he was a large man, but just a fast, tough one, sinewy and quick and raw.

He found his position, and the leader stepped into the crosshairs.

Now, he thought.

They walked slowly through the dark, seeing the train ahead of them in the dark, its flanks illuminated so slightly by the vagrant incandescence of Central Avenue far away, but filling the horizon with light.

There was no movement from the train. Whatever was transpiring was transpiring in silence. These guys were good: very professional, D. A. was thinking.

He glanced to either side, and could see the boys nearest to him and beyond that make out the shape of the boys further away. He was aiming to rally in the hitch of the armored car to the car behind it, then send two men down to the other end, and in that way set up a cross fire. He’d have one or two boys actually under the car too, in case Johnny’s men tried to duck out that way. Those boys could nail them easily. He was quite willing to kill all of Johnny’s boys. He knew in this business that you had to commit to killing early and stay committed. If you poisoned your mind with notions of mercy, it would cost you a moment’s hesitation and that could destroy you in a flash. When the guns came into play, shoot fast, shoot well, shoot a lot: those were the rules.

They were so close now.

The line disappeared or at least got so indistinct Earl could not pick it out against the slight illumination of the train a hundred yards off. There was a sense of blur, of disturbance to the atmosphere, but that only.

“They’re going to be okay, I think,” said the boy.

“They’re almost there. It’s looking—”

Five short bursts fired so fast it sounded unreal. In the clear part of his brain, Earl made the numb note that somebody had extremely good trigger control and that the weapon’s signature had an aching familiarity to it, something he knew so very well, and a fraction of a second later he identified it as an American carbine. But that part of his mind was very far away from the other part of his mind, which was hot and shocked and full of anger and fear and terror at once.

Ambush.

Perfecdy sprung, perfecdy set up, brilliantly planned.

Again the carbine: short, precise bursts, obviously an M2.

“Jesus, Earl,” the boy said, and made a move to run to the aid of his friends. But Earl’s first move was to grab the boy and haul him to earth.

“Stay,” he hissed, for even though he had yet to articulate it in any meaningful fashion, a number of anomalies struck him at once. Why was the fire so precise? At night it was almost always a question of area fire, sweeping and intense; or it involved a star shell, throwing its illumination across the terrain, so that targets could be marked. Neither of these night-action features presented themselves and though, like the boy, he had a longing to run to the wounded, he knew too that to do so was simply to enter the killing zone as defenseless as they.

And now he cursed the lack of a long gun. What he needed, he saw in a flash, was the BAR now locked in the State Police arsenal in Little Rock. With that powerful instrument he could suppress the battlefield, drive the shooters to cover, get his people a chance to get back.

“We need to—”

“No,” Earl exploded, “you follow on me.”

And with that Earl ran not to the killing zone, but rather to the switching shed, and set up a good supported kneeling position behind it, with just his head and shoulders and the pistol in a good two-handed position.

His ears found the zone and in a second a flash located the position. He could barely see his front sight, but he cranked up a good ten feet from the source of the fire, for he had to throw rounds in long arcs to get them there.

But it was a guessing game. He didn’t know where you held to bring a .45 slug onto target from an unknown distance of about a hundred or so yards.

He fired, seven times quickly, put the gun down, and took Carlo’s, who, smart as usual, had immediately understood the gist of it, and had prepared his own weapon for Earl, who then, with it, proceeded to lay out another magazine, exacdy as Carlo inserted another magazine into the empty gun.

It wasn’t much, but from far off came the splatter of shots hitting and kicking up dust and metal fragments, and maybe in that noise a kind of a sound of scurry or discomfort.

Earl had it now, and knew what would come next. He withdrew, knowing that he had but seconds. The boy was baffled.

“What are you—”

Again the carbine snapped out a short burst, and the astonishment came in where the bullets struck. Not near them, but exacdy where they had fired from. Three bullets bit into the wood of the switching shed in exacdy the location of Earl’s foray, and three more spat across the dirt, kicking up clouds and filling the air with gun spray.

“Jesus!” said the boy.

“He can seeT croaked Earl. He thought for a second, realized he was zeroed in some sense. But he also figured the gunman would guess he’d move to the other side of the switching house. He didn’t. He moved back to exacdy where he’d been, took a sight picture, fired to the same point, and withdrew. A burst answered him, and he thought that was the last time that would work.