A Dark and Lonely Place (50 page)

“Planks sound solid.” John lifted his face to the starry sky and inhaled deeply. “Listen,” he whispered.

“Don’t hear nothing,” his nephew said.

“That’s what’s wrong!” John dove for the door handle. Too late.

“Move and we shoot! We got the drop on you, Ashley! Hands up high! Everybody! Now!”

John exhaled slowly and raised his hands. “It’s an ambush, boys. Do what they say.”

Seven shadowy figures emerged from the darkness, one by one. All wore sidearms and held high-powered rifles in the firing position.

Young Hanford tensed, eyes darting, about to run for the car and his gun.

“Don’t!” John warned. “Don’t give ’em a reason to shoot. That’s what they want you to do.”

“He’s right! Do what he says,” a narrow-eyed deputy warned from behind his Winchester.

“They gonna take us to jail,” Ray whined.

“So?” John shrugged. “No jail can hold us long.”

Sorry, darlin’, he thought. I should have listened. Is she thinking of me? he wondered. Or is she asleep and dreaming? He could see Laura’s hair, as black and shiny as a raven’s wing, spread across her pillow.

The deputies advanced cautiously, the barrels of their long guns trained on the four prisoners. John recognized three as Bob Baker’s deputies. The other four were strangers.

“T. W. and Clyde. You too, Dan. Didn’t expect to see you up here.”

“Shut up, Ashley!” T. W. said sharply. His face glistened and his shirt was sweat-stained, though the night had grown cool.

A shrill high-pitched scream suddenly shattered the silent night. The deputies, already edgy, exchanged frightened glances.

John saw their eyes and felt the first sharp stab of fear. “Take it easy, boys,” he said calmly. “That’s just a big cat. A panther. We saw it back there on the road.” He stood stock still, his words reassuring. “We’re unarmed. Just passing through. Nobody here wants a fight.”

He saw how they looked at each other, knew what they were thinking, and remembered the fear in Laura’s voice.
I’ll never see you again.

“We shoulda ate the ham and the chicken when we had the chance,” Ray said, his eyes hungry, his hands high.

“Don’t talk,” John said.

Two of Merritt’s deputies warned John not to move, gingerly approached, handcuffed him first, then marched him away from the others. He did not resist. Resigned to their capture, Hanford Mobley, Ray Lynn, and Clarence Middleton submitted as well.

Once all were handcuffed, T. W. drew his pistol, strode up to John, and slammed it across his face, drawing blood. John staggered, knocked
off balance by the blow. Another deputy caught his cuffed hands to keep him on his feet.

“Sheriff Bob Baker sends his regards.” T. W. grinned and stood taller. “Not so tough now, are you, Ashley?” He drew the weapon back to strike another blow but was interrupted.

“That’s enough!” A tall, broad-shouldered stranger emerged from the woods at the side of the road. He had a high forehead, iron-gray hair, and sharp features beneath a wide-brimmed Stetson. He wore two pistols and a pair of handcuffs in his gun belt, and carried a rifle. “Hello, Ashley.”

Blood dripped into his good eye and blurred John’s vision. “Merritt?”

The man nodded.

“I knew we’d meet someday, Sheriff.”

“So did I, John. I been waiting.”

“We have no quarrel, Sheriff. We’ve done nothing illegal here in your jurisdiction and have no plans to. We’re just headed north.”

“Sorry.” Merritt shook his head. “I don’t allow outlaws in my county.”

“Where’s Baker?” John expected the Palm Beach sheriff to appear next.

“Home in Palm Beach, asleep in his own bed, most likely. Saint Lucie’s my jurisdiction. I’m just showing Baker a little professional courtesy.”

“Sorry he missed the party,” John said. “I been wanting to talk to him.”

“I’ll tell ’im you said that.” Merritt’s lips parted in a menacing smile.

When shadowy gunmen confronted the occupants of the car behind them, the two teenaged boys in the Model T on the bridge feared it was a robbery and they were next. They stashed their watches and billfolds beneath the seats and waited, hearts pounding.

After several minutes Ted Miller, the driver, grew impatient. “I’m going back there to see what’s going on,” he said, and stepped boldly out onto the bridge.

“Don’t!” his passenger, Sam Davis, shouted in panic. “Are you crazy? They’ll kill us both! They’ve got guns!”

Miller heeded his warning, scrambled back into the car, and slammed the door.

Sheriff Merritt heard the commotion, glanced up, then stepped away from the prisoner. “So long, John.” He sounded cheerful.

“Don’t go, Merritt.” John willed him to stay, but the veteran lawman ignored him, nodded to his deputies, then turned, still smiling, to walk across the bridge to the Model T.

To their immense relief, the boys in the car recognized the approaching gunman as their local sheriff. Merritt greeted them warmly and chuckled as they shared their fears and how they’d hidden their valuables.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about here,” he assured them. “Those are my men back there. We just captured John Ashley and his gang.”

“You sure it’s him?” Miller exclaimed.

“Sure as the sun’ll come up in the mornin’.” Merritt unhooked the chain that blocked the bridge, removed the lantern, then, still holding it, hopped onto their running board for a lift to his car on the far side. As they began to move, he glanced back and smiled again at John Ashley.

The boys dropped off the sheriff, drove back across the span, and slowed down to stare at the three handcuffed men near the Ford touring car. The fourth prisoner stood alone a short distance away, hands cuffed behind him, his face and shirt bloody.

“It’s him!” Miller said. “That’s really John Ashley!”

“They got ’im! They got ’im!” Davis hollered. “Don’t that beat all! Looks just like his picture.”

“Think they’ll hang ’im?” Miller asked, as a burly, mustachioed deputy tersely waved them on.

“Probably will,” Davis said cheerfully.

The boys rushed back to town to spread the news.

John Ashley watched their tail lights disappear into the dark. He listened to the sound of the car’s engine fade, along with any hope of surviving the night.

A cold wind in the trees raised the hair on the back of his neck. This time, he knew, was different. A bright quarter moon reigned over a star-studded night made for love, fresh starts, and new beginnings, not bad endings. How did this go so wrong? He closed his eyes, felt
Laura’s hands on his shoulders, saw how she looked when he loved her and the sunlight in her hair when he last saw her, so very long ago that morning.

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and spoke up for his sister’s child. “Clyde. Deputy Padgett, you know my nephew, Hanford, here. He’s just a boy . . .”

“Uncle John?” Hanford looked bewildered, then saw what was happening. “Oh, Lord. God, no!”

T. W. Stone fired the first shot. The others immediately followed with a barrage of gunfire.

“Oh, Jesus! No! God!” Ray wet himself as he staggered through muzzle flashes that lit up the night. The sound was deafening. The acrid smell of gunpowder hung in the air. Prisoners twitched and kicked as high-powered bullets slammed into flesh and bone, again and again, until the lawmen’s rifles were empty.

Ashley tried to speak as he hit the ground. But no one listened as he choked on gun smoke and his own blood.

He was thirty-six.

The killers stood like shadowy statues in the smoky aftermath. Their ears rang.

T. W. was the first to speak. “Go git it,” he told Clyde Padgett. “We got to bring it back.”

Padgett’s only response was to vomit into the high weeds at the side of the road.

T. W. turned to Dan.

“Not me,” he said, and slowly shook his head.

“Damn!” T. W. blurted impatiently. “Okay, I’ll git it myself.” He reloaded, tried to keep his hands steady, then stepped carefully, so as not to bloody his boots. He stood astride the body, stared down and tried hard to remember which eye this goddamn dead outlaw had lost. He couldn’t hesitate. The others were watching.

“Oops.” He guffawed in a show of bravado. “My mistake. That there’s the eye God gave him.” The smells of blood, gunpowder, and death filled his nostrils as he plucked out John Ashley’s glass eye with his thumb and index finger. He wiped it off, made a show of polishing it with his handkerchief, then wrapped and tucked it into his vest pocket.

“Trophy,” he explained gruffly, as Merritt’s men stared. “Baker plans to wear it on his watch fob.”

The silence was deafening.

“It’s a local thing,” T. W. said, weakly. “Bad blood. You’d need to live in Palm Beach and know everybody involved to appreciate it.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

B
ack in town, the teenagers quickly spread the news that John Ashley and his gang had been captured. A rowdy crowd gathered at the jail to see the notorious outlaws arrive in handcuffs.

But the men in handcuffs arrived instead at the local hardware store, which doubled as a mortuary. “We’ve got the Ashleys here!” Deputy T. W. Stone shouted jubilantly.

“Dead or alive?” Lester Lewis, a nervous part-time employee, called down from an upstairs window.

“Dead as hell!” the deputy bellowed.

Lewis took delivery of the four bodies, still handcuffed and stacked like cordwood atop one another in the back of a car.

Word traveled like wildfire. The crowd deserted the jail and rushed to the mortuary. They didn’t have a long wait. The bodies were carried out a short time later for display on the grass. By then the handcuffs had been removed.

Sheriff Merritt issued a proud statement to the press. His deputies, he said, had won a wild gun battle with outlaw John Ashley and his notorious gang, who’d fought to the death. “John Ashley died like he lived, with a smoking gun in each hand,” he said, and added that not a single lawman was lost or injured, not even a scratch.

Palm Beach Sheriff Bob Baker quickly followed with his own press release. “I learned,” he said, “that John Ashley and his men intended to travel upstate to rob a bank, hide out with relatives until after the election, and then come back to Palm Beach to assassinate me.” He said he’d shared the information and his three best men with Sheriff Merritt, who had offered his help.

The newspapers printed the lawmen’s statements verbatim.

The crowd continued to grow. Strangers and tourists, reporters and photographers, some from as far away as Miami, came to see the dead outlaws, who were brought out again the next day and displayed, like trophy animals, on a cold slab of sidewalk in front of Fee’s Hardware Store and Mortuary.

Spectators hoisted little children to their shoulders to better view “the wages of sin,” a reporter noted.

“I remember one body in particular,” a young man later told another reporter. “He looked real young, late teens or early twenties, uncovered on the cement sidewalk. He was real pale because all his blood had settled. They were all uncovered, laid out flat on their backs, arms at their sides. It scared the tar out of me.”

“John Ashley always looked bigger than life,” explained Arlo Harmond, a young harness maker, “so everybody wanted to see what he looked like dead.”

Fifty years later, a curious Miami newspaper reporter would ask him to recall his most unforgettable moment in a nearly extinct occupation. Harmond’s reply had little to do with the art of harness making. Without hesitation, he confessed that he’d never forgotten what he saw on the sidewalk outside that mortuary, particularly the handcuff marks on the wrists of the dead.

“Wish I never had seen them,” he said poignantly, still haunted in old age, half a century later.

Laura, Leugenia, and John’s brother, Bill, arrived later that day to claim the bodies of John and his nephew, Hanford. Though hundreds of morbidly curious strangers had leered close up at John’s corpse in a sideshow atmosphere, the undertaker barred Laura, refused to let her see him. Not proper, he said, since she was not John’s wife and he had already been stripped naked for embalming.

The undertaker changed his mind when she began to scream.

Loved ones also came for Clarence Middleton. Only Ray Lynn remained unclaimed. “We can’t let him go alone to an unmarked grave in Potters Field,” Laura insisted, “after he died beside John and Hanford.”

Leugenia and Bill agreed. They took Lynn to rest with John and Hanford in the tiny family cemetery near the Ashley home.

As the families grieved, Sheriff Merritt was hailed in the national press as a hero and bombarded by congratulatory telegrams. Railroad tycoons, bankers, politicians, clergymen, and postal inspectors praised the little-known sheriff as “brave and brilliant.”

New York City’s postal inspector urged other lawmen to adopt Merritt’s philosophy of “Do to others as they do to you, and do it first!”

Bank presidents sent Merritt and the deputies reward checks. Three days later he was reelected sheriff by a landslide. Palm Beach sheriff Bob Baker won election as well.

No cash or valuables were returned to the families with the embalmed bodies, or ever. John had left home with a large amount of cash in a money belt, his family said. But Merritt and the deputies swore that the dead outlaws didn’t have two nickels to rub together, not so much as a pocket watch, among them.

Devastated that John’s glass eye had been taken and aware of Baker’s plans, Laura dispatched a note:

“Return John Ashley’s eye to me. Now! If you don’t, I will crawl through hell if I have to, and take it away from you myself.”

Never a man to take threats lightly, Sheriff Baker had John’s eye delivered to the Ashley home in time for the funeral service.

“If I’d known he’d do that,” Deputy T. W. Stone raged to fellow deputies, “I’da smashed it under my foot on the bridge that night.”

The Ashley family disputed Merritt’s version of the killings even before they saw the cuts and bruises left by handcuffs on the dead mens’ wrists.

“They’re lying,” Leugenia told everyone. “It’s all lies. Don’t believe ’em. That was no gang. Just John’s nephew and two friends. Hanford came home from out of state to persuade John and the others to go with him to find work in a place where they could start new lives. John didn’t want no more killing. He didn’t plan to hurt no one or rob no bank. He left home wearing a money belt stuffed with cash. They stole it. There was no gunfight. They robbed, handcuffed, and murdered John, Hanford, and the others,” she swore.