Red Grass River (25 page)

James White let another long sigh. “How far to the nearest depot?”

“Olympia station, back the way you came,” John Ashley said. “Aint but a few miles.”

White tugged his White Sox cap low on his eyes and put his hands in his pockets. “You know, John: there’s people in Miami gonna be real unhappy about his. I’m responsible for the transfer of our Georgia stuff. I’ve got other drivers working for me. I got a half-dozen trucks to keep track of. You’re making me look bad at my work is what you’re doing.”

“Damn if that aint a sad story, Jimmy,” John Ashley said. “But the plain and simple of it is, we cant have somebody else making money by running whiskey through our territory without us gettin a share of it. I know you can understand that.”

“Oh hell yeah, John, I understand it just fine. But I dont think my bosses are gonna be near so understanding.”

“You explain it to them real good and maybe they will be,” John Ashley said. “They’re businessmen. They know taxes is part of doin business. They dont wanna pay the tax they can either take their hooch around Palm Beach County or they can lose it to us.” He headed for the Ford. Clarence Middleton was already behind the wheel and Roy Matthews in the backseat.

James White morosely shook his head. “You’re fucking with the wrong people, John.”

“Tell Bellamy I said his momma sucks nigger dicks,” Roy Matthews called back to him.

“You always been a silvertongue, Roy,” James White said.

Then Clarence Middleton was accelerating the Ford down the road and all three of them were laughing and James White and his driver stood in the raised dust and watched them go.

The next one came through at night and didnt even slow down nor try to go swerve around Clarence Middleton who stood stark in its headlights and was obliged to dive off the road and into the palmettos to avoid being run over. As the truck roared past them John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews opened fire on its wheels and the flaming rifleshots blew out three of its tires. The truck veered and then straightened out and tried to go on with its useless tires flapping and its rims cutting rasping grooves in the whiterock road but the engine was laboring hard and now it began stuttering under the heavy drag and the truck slowed steadily and finally stalled. And here came John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews on the run through the dust with Clarence Middleton behind them and cursing the bastards who’d tried to run him down but by the time they got to the vehicle the driver and shotgun rider had fled into the woods.

They repaired the flattened tires and took turns on the air pump and when all the tires were inflated Clarence got in the truck and drove the load of booze to Twin Oaks with John Ashley and Hanford Mobley following close in the Ford touring car.

Some weeks later, on a cool January evening, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley lay hidden among the sea oats on the crest of a Jupiter Island sand dune and watched a whiskey sloop bobbing easily on the swells fifty yards offshore as it unloaded its cargo. Although the bigger rumships that could carry several thousand cases were now careful to conduct their load transfers outside the three mile limit of the Coast Guard’s legal authority, the captain of this sloop obviously had no fear of doing business so close to shore. A trio of large motorboats operating without running lights was nestled against the sloop’s hull and taking on the booze. The Ashley gang had pulled a half-dozen road hijackings by now but this was their first beach job.

They could see that the booze was in sacks instead of wooden crates. The smugglers were always learning new tricks for their trade and this was a recent one in the way they packed whiskey for transport. The bottles were now commonly packed in burlap sacks jacketed with
straw—three to six bottles to the sack—and the sack tied tightly to hold the bottles snugly together. Because of the resemblance, these booze sacks were called hams. They made for easier handling and more compact loading. Twice as much liquor could be put in a cargo hold when it was packed in hams rather than crates, and pairs of hams tied together with lengths of cord could be hung around a man’s neck for portage from beach to trucks. Frank and Ed Ashley themselves now insisted that the whiskeyloads they took aboard the
Della
in the Bahamas be packed as hams.

The Ashleys had also adopted another common rummer’s trick, one intended to avoid capture with a load of booze. They securely glued a light ball of cork about as big as a baseball to a fist-sized bag of salt, then tied one end of a six-fathom length of fishing line to the cork and the other end to a ham, then hung the coiled line over the neck of the ham. They did this with about dozen hams in every load. If it should ever look to them like they were going to be intercepted by the Coast Guard, they would jettison the load before they hove to—and then later, after the salt dissolved and released the cork markers to bob to the surface, they could come back and use divers to retrieve the cargo.

They knew the tactic was not assured of success. They had heard stories of rummers who dumped their loads in water too deep for the markers to reach the surface. And of instances when somebody else came along and spied the markers and stole the whiskey before the rummers could come back for it. Smuggling was a lucrative enterprise precisely because it was fraught with risk. To the outsiders now landing their booze in Palm Beach County, the Ashley Gang was about to present itself as one of the more severe risks in the business.

A dozen yards fore of the sloop a school of silvery fish broke the water in a sparkling phosphorescent rush ahead of a pursuing pack of dark dorsal fins. A half-moon pale as a skull hung high in the east. The sky was cloudless and swarming with stars. A cool saltwind came softly off the ocean. John Ashley felt the beauty of this world as a tight clutching in his chest. A comet cut across the night in a fine bright-yellow streak and vanished in the measureless void and he wondered if it now existed anywhere at all.

Between the island and the mainland was the Jupiter Narrows, a labyrinthine tangle of mangrove channels pungent with marine decay. At this location the channels were shallow enough to ford and on the mainland side of the Narrows an oystershell trail had been hacked through the mangroves and laid to a clearing in the hardwoods and
pines farther inland. The clearing stood within a hundred yards of the Dixie Highway but was fully hidden from its view. A pair of trucks was waiting there to receive the whiskey. In each of the cabs sat a driver and a guard, smoking and quietly talking, unaware of being watched from the trees by Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton, both of whom held shotguns charged with buckshot.

Now the transfer was complete and the motorboats swung away from the sloop and came churning for the beach, their motors rapping on the night air. Behind them the sloop weighed anchor and hoisted sail and made away on the wind like a pale phantom. The motorboats rose and dipped over the swells and came through the cut in the bar where the waves broke. The pilots throttled back their engines and the boats glided up onto the beach in front of a line of dunes some thirty yards from the where John Ashley and Hanford Mobley lay watching.

A shore party of ten men scrambled from the shadows and began unloading the booze. Soon all the hams were on the beach and the motorboats were heading for open water again and bursting through the combers in sprays of spume and then one after another veering to the south and a minute later not even their foamy wakes were in evidence.

The men of the shore party now hung hams around their necks and began trudging over the dunes and through the sea oats and down to the meager mangrove path leading to the Narrows. One man was left on the beach to watch over the rest of the whiskey. The shore party filed into the shallow lagoon and made their way across under the blazing moon.

The Ashley Gang waited and watched—John Ashley and Hanford Mobley from the dunes, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews from the trees at the edge of the clearing—watched as the shore party went back and forth over the Narrows, carrying whiskey to the trucks. When the last of the hams was retrieved from the beach, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley followed the shore party at a distance through the mangroves and across the Narrows and into the trees. They hung back in the shadows while the last sacks of whiskey were put aboard the trucks under the supervision of one of the drivers, a man wearing a longbilled fishing cap. Illuminated by a pair of kerosene lanterns hung on a pine branch, the clearing was cast in a ghostly yellow light. The shore party spoke little as it went about its work. Then the fishing-capped man pulled down in turn the rear tarpaulin flap on each truck and tied it snugly in place and the trucks were ready to go.

John Ashley and Hanford Mobley stepped out of the shadows and
took positions a dozen feet apart and aimed their cocked shotguns at the guards and drivers. John Ashley said, “You even think about them pistols on your hips, boys, and your brains’ll be all over the bushes.” The drivers and guards put their hands up and stood still but for breathing.”

Some in the shore party glanced around as if thinking to bold. But now Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews appeared from the darkness of the trees with their shotguns ready and Clarence Middleton said, “Stand fast, cousins.”

John Ashley ordered them all to clasp their hands on top of their heads and then told everybody in the shore party except the drivers and guards to bunch up in the middle of the clearing. Hanford Mobley hastened for the pump shotguns the truck guards had left propped against a pine tree. He pitched one to Clarence Middleton and one to Roy Matthews and now they both brandished a shotgun in each hand like a pair of huge pistols. Mobley then went to the drivers and relieved them of the revolvers in their hip holsters—a .38 and a .44 caliber. He tucked the .38 in his waistband and lobbed the bigger piece to John Ashley, who kept it in hand.

“Hey, Johnny,” Hanford Mobley said, “lookit here who’s ridin with these boys.”

One of the truck guards had been trying to keep his face averted from the light and shielded by his upraised arms. He was short and thickshouldered and when he looked directly at Mobley and grinned his mouth looked almost toothless for the blackness of his teeth. It was Phil Dolan who operated the trading post on the Salerno docks. “How do, Hannie,” he said. “How you keepin?”

“Well damn, Phil,” John Ashley said, coming up to him, “what you doin ridin shotgun for this bunch?”

Dolan showed an abashed smile. “Aw hell, it’s just for the money is all. I aint been doing a lot of business lately. The trappers’re havin to go way out farther in the Glades than they used to get a full load of hides. You know thats true, John. Nowadays by the time they get theirselfs a load they usually closer to the Okeechobee or the Indiantown trade posts. They aint about to tow them hides all the way back to me if they can sell them just as good over there. I mean, my business gone all to hell recent, I aint lyin.”

He’d been talking rapidly and now paused to lick his lips. The look he gave John Ashley beseeched understanding. “A while back these fellers come to my place and said they was from Miami and they’d pay me two hundred dollars for ever back road I could show them
through Palm Beach County and another hundred for just ridin with the trucks when they come through. Said they’d pay me another two hundred for ever good spot I could show them for unloading stuff on the beach. Well hell, John, I couldnt rightly turn down no offer like that, now could I?”

“Dont look like you could, Phil,” John Ashley said. He was surprised to be bothered as much as he was by the fact of a local cracker in the employ of the Yankee bootleggers. He nodded at the man with the fishing cap and said, “This the party chief?”

Phil Dolan glanced at the fishing-capped man and nodded.

“I can talk for myself,” the party chief said.

John Ashley told him to shut up. Then asked Dolan: “Who were these fellas sweet-talked you so easy, Phil?”

“They had Yankee accents, the both them. Wore suits. They never said their names and I never asked. I heard one say they worked for a fella called Ben Mead, I think he said. But—”

“Bellamy,” Roy Matthews said.

Phil Dolan glanced at him and shrugged. “Could be, I guess. Anyway, it wasnt sweet-talk like you say, Johnny. It was just the money, is all. You should see the money they had. Big roll of hundred-dollar bills like you wouldnt believe. Said they’d pay me in advance and then did it. Hell Johnny, how was I gonna turn down somethin like that? Would you have, you was me?”

“I aint you, Phil,” John Ashley said. His impassive air unnerved Phil Dolan the more.

“Oh hell, John,” he said, “it’s just the money, man. It dont mean nothin.”

The party chief hawked and spat. He was stocky and wore several days’ growth of whiskers. The look he held on Phil Dolan was hard with disdain. The other driver and guard looked as fearful as Dolan.

“How about that shotgun you was carryin, Phil,” Hanford Mobley said. He’d perceived John Ashley’s intention to make Phil Dolan sweat a little for going on the Bellamy payroll and he thought to get in on the fun. “Aint that for shootin anybody tries to hijack this load?” He was smiling at Dolan’s fear. The men of the shore party stood still as a painting.

“Jesus, I wouldnt shoot none of
you
, Hannie,” Phil Dolan said, his face gone even paler now. He knew John Ashley for a reasonable man but Hanford Mobley was of a more volatile nature. He turned back to John Ashley and said, “It’s just for show, that shotgun, it’s just…ah hell. Johnny, you wouldnt shoot
me
?” His attempt at a
smile was pitiful. “We
know
each other, man. We done business for years, you and me.”

“Quit your whining, you pussy son of a bitch,” the party chief said.

John Ashley turned to tell him that if he said another word without permission he’d break his jaw—and in that instant Phil Dolan broke for the trees and Roy Matthews shouted, “Watch it, Johnny!”

All in one motion John Ashley whirled and raised the revolver and fired. The pistol blasted an orange streak and bucked hard in his hand and a chunk of Phil Dolan’s skull jumped off his head and Dolan lunged forward with his arms out to his sides like he was flinging himself into the surf. He lit on his face and lay still.