Hot Springs (55 page)

Five men, heavily armed, fleeing Hot Springs. They have to get to a remote spot where a plane can pick them up.

There’s only one such place within a night’s travel. But how will they find it? There’re no paved roads in, only a hopeless mesh of old logging trails, some drivable, some not. Who would help them?

It would have to be a man who knew the territory better than anyone. Sheriff Charles Swagger, the great lawman and hunter.

And they’d know about Swagger. He had a secret life in Hot Springs. Once a month, he’d show up for gambling and whoring and sporting with the special, secret vice he loved the best. Owney Maddox, that champion of human weakness, would know this. He’d have the leverage on old Charles and there would be the man, a paragon of public morality for so long, suddenly caught in the grip and crushed into obedience by a gangster.

So Charles would draw up a route. He would then engineer the roadblocks so that the fleeing men could get through them when they reached Polk County. Then he would meet them deep in the forest, and take them the last few miles to Hard Bargain Valley, and it would be a good bargain for them, for the plane would come at dawn and pluck them away and they’d have disappeared forever. The $400,000 would be quickly enough laundered and it would return in a few weeks to Hot Springs, as working capital for Owney Maddox, who would use it to build the Southern, the most elegant and successful casino in America.

Earl could see the last melancholy act too. Charles hadn’t known men had been killed in the robbery. He’d gotten in because it was just robbers stealing money from Big Business like Alcoa and the money would go to gamblers, it was just the way the world worked, victimless, corrupt, ancient. But four men had died and suddenly his father is an accessory to murder. It sickens him, and that’s why he returns home drunk and bent with anger at himself, and who does he run into but his young son, Bobby Lee, and the boy becomes the focus of his fury, his deep disappointment in himself, all his failures. He beats the boy and beats him and beats him, then passes out. Maybe he beats him to death and strings up the body to hide the crime. Maybe the boy hangs himself. But that is how it had to be. The evil father, the helpless son, the one man who had a chance to stop it fled to another family called the United States Marine Corps.

It was at that point Earl realized that they would do tonight exacdy what they did in 1940. Of course. It was the same problem, except the treasure wasn’t a payroll, it was Owney Maddox himself. It had worked before. The same route, the same arrangements with a plane, the same destination. Only this time they didn’t need a Charles Swagger because they were smart, one of them had paid attention and he could find Hard Bargain Valley on his own.

Earl looked at his watch. It was near 8:00 and the sun was almost gone.

They were going to get away with it, because nobody else knew where Hard Bargain Valley was or could get there in time.

He himself had no idea where it was. It was somewhere in the mountain vastness that even now was fading into darkness and that no one could find who hadn’t been there before and didn’t know the way and he didn’t know the way and there was no map, the map was gone.

Then Earl remembered his daddy’s room. The map was gone, yes, but its outline still was described by that bright patch of unfaded paint.

He turned swifdy, walked back through the house and entered the room.

He faced the emptiness.

Nothing. What had he expected? It was just a square of lighter paint, even now losing its distinction as the light failed.

He tried to remember what it showed. It showed Polk, one of Arkansas’s most westerly, most poverty-stricken, most mountainous, most remote counties. He tried to think: What is the essential quality of Polk County? He tried to remember as he stared at the square: What did I see here? Remember what you saw. Remember what was here.

He remembered. A big map, with few roads and many creeks, and many blank areas marked UNMAPPED. The swirl of color depicting different elevations as the larger forms of the mountains were at least suggested. But what was the pure quality of Polk County by shape?

He remembered: it was very regular. It was, like the sheet of paper that documented it, almost perfecdy rectangular, with only a flare to the northwesterly comer and the southwesterly quarter to render the shape irregular. But otherwise it was drawn as if with a ruler, by men who laid out counties from far away without any knowledge of what the land was and therefore in defiance of the land. The borders didn’t follow mountain crests or rivers or natural forms in the land; they defied them, they bisected them, they conquered them.

So the rectangle on the wall, it almost represented the pure shape of the county, with those deviations in the corner that were largely irrelevant because neither of them contained unmapped areas.

Earl tried to remember. What else was there? What else marked the county? He couldn’t remember anything, any roads, any mountains, any creeks or rivers. It was over sixteen years since he’d really been here. How could he be expected to—

Pins. Pins. The map was festooned with pins where Charles Swagger had taken game and over the years he’d taken a lot of game, and he loved mule deer most of all, mulies they were called, magical creatures of muddy earth color who exploded from stillness to grace to invisibility in the blinking of an eye, and if you even saw one, much less managed to kill one, you felt that nature had been benevolent.

Earl looked away, then looked back again, seeing nothing. Then he edged sideways so that he saw the blank space on the wall at an angle, and could read the texture of it and that’s when he saw them.

Of course. The map was gone. The pins were gone. The Swaggers were gone, all of them, dead or cursed, especially this last one, but what remained after it all were the pinholes.

Scanning the empty space from an angle, Earl quickly began to pick them up, here, there, one at a time, little pricks in the plaster, perhaps visible only in this light, with its play of shadows to bring out the irregularities. A prick here, a prick there, two pricks close together and—

That would be it. That had to be it.

A large concentration of pricks lay in the northwest comer of the lightened space, maybe thirty-five or forty. Not in a cluster, but in two parallel lines, suggesting the margins of the treeline defining the valley itself. That’s where Hard Bargain Valley would be. That’s where Charles Swagger went every year and every year he tagged his mulie buck, in the margins, just off the flat, remote high field of yellow grass, over which crows heeled and cruised, like omens of ill chance.

Earl knew: it’s in the northwest comer of the county.

He knew if he could get close enough by car, he could hump it in if he worked like the devil. He’d need a county map—there was an Arkansas state map in large scale in his car, and with it he could get close enough. It was maybe two hours’ driving, maybe four hours of hard hike and climbing. He glanced at his watch. He could make it by dawn with an hour to spare.

He only needed one more thing.

He went into the third dusty stall and bent to the boards against the wall. He remembered hiding here in the long ago, from his father’s rages. Earl! the old man would cry, Early you get your ass in herey goddammit! But Daddy never found him though it only forestalled the beatings a few minutes. No one else ever found him there either. He bet Bobby Lee had a secret place too, but this was Earl’s.

With a few swift tugs he removed the boards from the wall. He leaned in—as he had when he stopped at the farm months ago, though then to emplace, not remove. He leaned in and dragged it out, a green wooden box wrapped in a tarpaulin, which bore the stamp SWAGGER USMC atop it, denoting that it was a sea chest that had followed its owner from ship to ship and battle to battle. He dragged the case into the bam, flicked on the bare-bulb light and pried it open.

More objects wrapped in canvas lay inside. He removed them, then unwrapped them, seeing each gleam dully in the yellow light. Each still wore that slick of oil that would keep it safe from the elements. He knew the parts so well. The frame and stock group, the barrel and receiver group, the bolt and recoil-spring group, the buffer and buffer pad. They all slid together with the neatness of something well designed. He knew the gun’s trickery, all the little nuances of its complexity, where the bolt had to be, how the pins had to be set, when to screw in the bolt handle. Finally he slid the frame and stock group together and locked it in, and the thing assumed its ultimate shape. It took less than three minutes and he held his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, with its finless barrel and its snout of muzzle, like a pig’s ugly nose, its bluntness, its utilitarian grayness, its faded wood and scratched grip. He also had ten 30-round magazines and in the trunk of his car a thousand rounds of .45 ball tracer that he’d meant to trade to some other law enforcement agency.

Now, as in so many other nights of his life these past years, he had to get somewhere by the dawn. In the dawn, the killing would begin.

At last, with a burst of energy from its 324 Packard horses, the Ford wagon got up a little hill and broke free from the trees.

“We’re here,” said Johnny Spanish, “with more than an hour to spare. Did I not tell you, Owney, you English sot, I’d have it done in time for you?”

Owney felt a vast relief.

He stumbled from the vehicle, taking in a breath of air, feeling it explode in his lungs.

The field seemed to extend for a hundred miles in each way under a starry sky and a bright bone moon. In pale glow it undulated ever so slightly from one end to the other. He could make out a low ridge of hills at the far side but on this side there were only trees as the elevation led up to it.

The last hours had been ghastly. Slow travel down dirt roads, at least twice when the engine seemed to stall, rough little scuts of inclines where all the boys had to get out and Johnny’s deft skills alone, his gendeness with the engine, his knowing the balance and power of the automobile, when those alone had gotten them up and to another level.

How had Johnny known so well? It had been six years since, and in that experience that old sheriff had been the guide. He must have some memory. He was definitely a genius.

“You did it, lad,” he said to Johnny.

“That I did. You’re grateful now, Owney, but come the pay-up time it won’t seem like so much. You’ll come to believe you yourself could have done it and what I did will seem as nothing. Then you’ll try to jew me down hard, I know.”

“No,” said Owney. “Fair is fair. You boys done two hard jobs in the last two weeks. I’ll pay you double what I paid for the yard job.”

“Think six times, Owney.”

“Six!”

“Six. Not twice times, but six times. It’s fair. It leaves you with a lot of what you’ve got.”

“Jesus. It was a one-day job.”

“Six, Owney. It was a five-day job, with lots of arranging to be done. Else you’d be looking at the rest of your time in an Arkansas Dannamora.”

“Four and it’s a deal.”

“All right, Owney, because I don’t like to mess about. Make it five, we shake on it, and that would be that.”

Owney extended his hand. He had just paid $1.5 million for his new life. But he had another $7 million left, and beyond that, $3 million in European banks that neither a Johnny Spanish nor a Bugsy Siegel nor a Meyer Lansky knew a thing about.

They shook.

“Boys, we’re rich,” said Johnny.

“Richer, you mean,” said Owney.

“We’re set for life. No more jobs. We can toss the tommies off the Santa Monica fishing pier.”

“Believe I’ll keep my Browning,” said Herman. “You never know when it’ll come in handy.”

“All right, you lot, just a bit more to do. You know the drill.”

They had to secure the field for landing. This involved reading the wind, for the plane landed against it and took off with it. As efficiently as any OSS team setting up a clandestine landing in occupied France, Johnny’s boys picked some equipment out of the rear of the big Ford and went deep into the valley. There they quickly assembled a wind pylon and read the prevailing breeze. It was now only a matter of using a flare to signal the aircraft when she came, then turning her, then climbing aboard and it was all over.

While the boys did their work, and then moved the car to the appropriate spot in the valley, Owney took out and lit a cigar. It was a Cohiba, from the island, a long thing with a tasty, spicy tang to it, and it calmed him down.

He had made it. He, Owney, had done it. He was out; he would repair to the tropics and begin to plot, to raise a new crew, to pay back his debts, to engineer a way back into the rackets.

He had an image of Bugsy after the hit. He imagined Bugsy’s face, blown open by bullets. Bugsy in one of his famous creamy suits, spattered with black blood, his athlete’s grace turned to travesty by the twisted position into which he had fallen. He saw Bugsy as the centerpiece in a tabloid photo, its harshness turning his death into some grotesque carnival. When a gangster died, the public loved it. The gangsters were really the royalty of America, bigger in their way than movie stars, for the movies the gangsters starred in were real life, played out in headlines, whereas an actor’s heroics took place only in a fantasy realm. A star in a moving picture could come back and make another one; a star in a tabloid picture could not, and that impressed incredible elan and grace upon the gangster world. It was glamorous like the movies but real like life and death itself.

Then he heard it. Oh, so nice.

From far off the buzz of a multiengine plane. She’d circle a bit, waiting for a little more of the light that was beginning to creep across the western sky to illuminate the valley, then down she’d come. It was a good boy, or so Johnny insisted. A former Army bomber pilot who could make an airplane do anything she could do and had set planes down on dusty strips all over the Pacific. But before that the boy had run booze and narcotics for some Detroit big boys, where he really learned his craft.