Red Grass River (26 page)

A pair of shotguns boomed almost simultaneously and John Ashley spun in a crouch with the revolver ready and saw Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews jacking fresh shells and both of them looking to the edge of the woods where the party chief lay in an awkward tangle a few feet shy of the trees which was as far as he’d gotten before the buckshot took him down. In the hazy lantern light his left forearm was ripped open to the bones and his back looked scooped of a spadeful of flesh and rib to expose to the indifferent stars his mutilated organs. The air smelled of gunsmoke.

Everyone held mute. John Ashley slowly lowered his gun and turned and walked over to Phil Dolan and stared down at the lanternlit spill of blood and brainmatter around his broken skull. You dumb cracker, he thought—it wasnt no need. He wasnt sure if his thoughts were directed at Phil Dolan or himself or both. He stood perplexed by his own angry sorrow.

He saw Clarence Middleton looking serious and Hanford Mobley grinning widely at nobody in particular. Roy Matthews was squatting beside the shotgunned man and now looked over at John Ashley and shook his head. The men of the shore party had all put their hands up high. They looked terrified. “Put your hands down,” John Ashley said to the shore party, and some did, and some put them back on top of their heads, and some seemed reluctant to bring them down at all.

“I said put them
down
, goddammit!” John Ashley shouted. “Not on your head, just
down
” He looked ready to shoot them all. Some of them were petty criminals but most were simply unemployed laborers who’d thought themselves lucky to be recruited for the shore party. Excepting two veterans of the Great War and a man who’d seen one bum stab another to death in a St. Louis alleyfight, none among them had ever before witnessed a killing.

John Ashley sighed heavily and put the revolver in his waistband and rested the shotgun barrel against his shoulder and rubbed his face hard. He regarded the frightened men before him, then walked up and looked closely into every man’s face in turn. Then he directed Clarence Middleton to give each man five dollars. As Clarence dispensed the money, John Ashley told them they had until sunup to get out of Palm Beach County. They could not go back to Dade. They could not go south at all. They could go only north to at least Jacksonville or north-westward to at least Pensacola. “Be best if you get all the way out the state,” John Ashley said. “Now I know what all you look like and I never forget a face. I ever see any of you anywhere in Florida outside of Jacksonville or Pensacola, I wont even ask you what you’re doin. I’ll just shoot you where you stand. Do you all believe me?”

They nodded, all of them quickeyed and tightfaced. John Ashley told them to get on the trucks, he was taking them to the train station. The men loosened the tarp covers and clambered aboard and positioned themselves carefully so as not to upset the hams. When every man of them was on the trucks, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley drew down the tarps and tied them tightly in place. Then John took Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton aside and told them to dispose of the bodies where they wouldn’t be found.

An hour later John Ashley and Hanford Mobley were watching the Midnight Flyer pulling out of the West Palm Beach station with its whistle shrieking and its smokestack huffing high black plumes and tossing sparks as the train headed for Jacksonville and points north with all ten men of the shore party aboard. At the same moment, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews, with a pair of dead men stretched at their feet, were on an eighteen-foot launch cutting through the ocean and heading for the Gulf Stream under the high half-moon. When they reached the Stream they would cut back the motor and the boat would rise and fall on the silvery swells as they tied concrete blocks to the dead men’s feet and cut their bellies open with a buck knife and felt the boat bottom go slick under their shoes. They would roll the bodies over the side to plunge into the dark fastrunning depths with blood billowing and intestines uncoiling and sharks closing fast to rid the world of all mortal evidence that these men did ever exist.

February—June 1921

O
VER THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS THEY HIJACKED NEARLY OF DOZEN
truckloads of booze coming through on Palm Beach County roads and another half-dozen shipments that landed at various beaches along the county shoreline. The word was out among rumrunners in Florida: you paid the tribute the Ashleys demanded or you risked having them hijack your load—or you found some roundabout route to bypass their territory and get your stuff to Miami. Some of the runners coming through Palm Beach were smalltimers trying to build up their portion of Miami trade and most of them grudgingly paid off the Ashleys rather than lose their cargoes. But Nelson Bellamy steadfastly refused to pay for the right to move his product through Palm Beach County. Now and then one of his crews managed to sneak a load through Palm Beach without being spotted, but the Ashley Gang continued to intercept most of his truck imports and beach drops and cut deeply into his profits.

From the time of their first hijackings Gordon Blue had pleaded with them to desist from stealing Nelson Bellamy’s booze. “Take anybody else’s stuff but not his,” Blue told them one afternoon at Twin Oaks. “He works for the Chicago organization, for God’s sake. I represent his legal interests down here. He knows I represent you too, but he says he doesnt hold me responsible for your actions. That’s what he
says
. But every time you jack one of his shipments, he gives
me
a hard look. You’re putting me in a tight spot with the Miami people, boys, is what I’m saying.”

“If he’s so mad at us, why aint he done nothin about it when we’re in Miami?” Frank Ashley said. “We’re down there all the time—dancin at the Elser, eatin in restaurants. We do a little gamblin in Hardieville, we stay in hotels. It aint hard to find us. If he’s so made why aint he tried to shoot our ass off like he tried that one time with old Roy here?”

“Believe me, Frank, he would if he thought he could get away with it,” Gordon Blue said. “But the chief of police told him if there’s anymore public violence he’ll come down on him and his organization with both feet, no matter how much they juice him. Too many citizens have complained to him about the rough stuff in the streets. No, you boys are all right in Miami as long as you stay together so he cant take you down one at a time. But
me
, I’m the one getting heat from the son of a bitch.”

Joe Ashley said he didnt see what Gordon was so worried about if Bellamy wasnt holding him to account for the Ashleys. “It’s between him and us,” Old Joe said. “Got nothin to do with you, so you got nothin to fret about.” He dismissed with a handwave any rebuttal Gordon Blue might have thought to make.

Bill Ashley had sat in on the meeting but said nothing, knowing well when his father’s position was adamant. But he had earlier argued in private with Old Joe that the hijackings were bad business and could only lead to greater troubles, that the wiser course would be to seek some sort of accommodation with Bellamy. The look Old Joe gave him was rawly scornful. “You dont go askin for
accommodation
with some sumbitch dont show you the proper respect, boy,” he said. “Aint you learned that by now?”

Most of the hijackings during those four months went fast and smoothly—but on three occasions Bellamy’s truck crews made a fight of it. In both of the first two scraps, a truck guard got wounded but neither was killed. The sole Ashley Gang casualty came in the second fight, during a hijacking in March and less than a mile south of Boynton Beach. Albert Miller had been pleading with John Ashley for weeks to take him along on a job, and in this, his first one, he got his ring finger shot off. “To hell with this Jesse James stuff,” he said on the drive back to Twin Oaks, holding tight to the bloody bandanna wrapped around the finger stub that Ma Ashley would cauterize and bind properly. “You boys can have it.”

The most recent skirmish came on a moonlit night in April. They’d stopped a truck loaded with Jamaican rum on a desolate stretch of the
Dixie Highway south of Hobe Sound and were walking up to the vehicle with their guns in hand when suddenly one of the tarpaulin sideflaps flew up and two men inside began firing wildly into the shadows with steadily flaring automatic rifles. Bullets ricocheted off the road and hummed through the air and chunked into the pines as the Ashley Gang dove for cover every which way and then counterattacked with a blazing fusillade of riflefire and buckshot into the rear of the truck. A third guard was shooting from the cab with a Winchester carbine. Hanford Mobley snaked his way on his belly through the palmettos and across the road and then stood up in the driver’s side window and said, “Hey!” The guard turned from the other window and his last vision in this world was of the bright blast of Hanford Mobley’s .45 two feet from his face—in that instant the back of his head burst open and portions of his brain sprayed over the roadside brush.

When the shooting was done, both of the guards in the rear of the truck were sprawled on the floor, their mortal remains pickling in the wash of sprits from the shattered bottles, their blood mingling with it. John Ashley looked in at them and sighed and said, “Well hell.”

Hanford Mobley said they werent worth feeling sorry for. “Them boys could be standing there breathin and thinkin how good they next piece a ass was gonna feel, but no, they had to make a fight of it. Fuck em.”

John Ashley shook his head but couldnt help smiling. “You’re a hard man, Hannie.” To which a grinning Mobley responded goddamned right he was.

The vapor of rum stung their eyes. Clarence joked that he was getting drunk just breathing the air. Half the load was yet intact and the gang transferred these hams to their own truck. Some of the sack bottoms were soaks with bloody rum. They took up the rummers’ weapons and were delighted with the pair of .30-06 Browning Automatic Rifles. They found also a pouch of extra 20-round magazines and Hanford Mobley released the empty magazine in one of the rifles and snapped in a full one. “I just got to try this thing,” he said. He stepped out into the road and aimed from the hip at the trunk of a tall pine silhouetted against the moon. He squeezed off a long deep-popping burst, the muzzle flaming and momentarily pulling to the right with the recoil before Mobley swung it back on target without easing off the trigger and the rounds kept pouring forth and began ripping chunks off the pine trunk and then the magazine was empty. Mobley
lowered the BAR and gaped at grinning John Ashley and said, “
Damn!
”

Clarence Middleton had the other BAR and now he opened fire on the tall pine also, shooting in short bursts as he had been taught in the marines, and bark flew off the pine to either side and then his weapons too was empty. He smiled broadly and said, “I believe we gained us a tad more firepower, what I believe.”

They aligned the three dead men side by side on the truck bed and John Ashley ordered the driver—who’d survived the fight by diving under the truck—to deliver the bodies to his bosses in Miami. As the truck clattered away to the south, the Ashley Gang made bets among themselves as to how far it would get before the cops flagged it down to investigate the effluence of rum and inquire after the bullet holes.

A few days after that skirmish Gordon Blue came to see them at Twin Oaks. He was nervous and looked paler even than his usual milkiness.

“This war has
got
to stop, Joe,” he said at the supper table. “How about if I tell Bellamy you’d like to sit down with him, tell him you’d like to see if something can be worked out?”

“How about he asks
us
to sit down with him because
he
wants to see can something be worked out?” John Ashley said. Old Joe smiled around his pipe and nodded.

His eyes bloodshot and baggy, Gordon Blue obviously had not been sleeping well. His goatee was in need of a trim, his suit was rumpled, his tie hung loose at his collar. He rubbed his haggard face and sighed deeply. “Joe, please—let me arrange a meeting. Hell, they dont like losing loads to you, but they dont like bad publicity either. Did you know the Lauderdale cops stopped that truck with the dead guys in it? They said it smelled like an open rum barrel rolling down the street. Said it looked like something from the war. Naturally they pulled it over. Then they open the back and see the dead guys. ‘What the hell’s this?’ they ask the driver. ‘Who’re these dead men?’ The driver says, ‘There are
dead men
in there? Oh sweet Jesus!’ The cops said the guy was so good he nearly made himself faint.”

Everybody laughed except Gordon Blue who but smiled weakly and shook his head. Frank Ashley winked at his brothers. He had won the wager about how far the truck would get.

“Could use more fellers like that driver,” Old Joe said, still chortling. “Shoulda hired him, Johnny, while ye had the chance.” John Ashley smiled and nodded.

“It’s not really funny,” Gordon Blue said. “The papers in Lauder-dale and Miami both ran a story about it. Bellamy was as hot about the bad publicity as he was about getting jacked again. I’m serious, Joe, he’s ready to work something out and we ought to take him up on it. If we dont, there’s no telling what’ll happen but it wont be any good for anybody, thats for sure.”

“I’ll tell you what can be worked out,” Joe Ashley said. “He can agree to give us a cut of everything he brings through Palm Beach. He agrees to that and he can run all the hooch he wants through here. You reckon he’ll go for
that
?”

“Well yes, sure—sure he will,” Gordon Blue said, surprised by Old Joe’s sudden amenability. “Bellamy’s a reasonable man, Joe. It’s cheaper for him to give you a cut than keep losing loads to you and he knows it. Hell, giving you a cut is the only compromise that makes sense. Let me arrange a meeting and the two of you can talk about it.”

Old Joe looked at Bill Ashley sitting beside him. “I reckon I know where you stand on this.”

“It’s time we made some kind of deal so we can do business without more shootin,” Bill said. “I’ve said that from the start. We can quit jackin him and start concentrating on bringin more booze in from the islands.”

“Bill’s absolutely right,” Gordon Blue said to Old Joe. “You’ll make more money if you strike a deal with Bellamy. Everybody makes more money all around. The main thing is, the shooting’s
got
to stop. Sheriff Baker’s let us operate in whiskey without interference, Joe, but if this war with Bellamy stars scaring the citizens he’ll have to do something about it. That Boynton Beach fight a few weeks ago was way too close to town. People heard it, Joe, they got woke up by it. A stray bullet broke the window out of some fellow’s car a half-mile away. They were a dozen complaints to Bob Baker. He told the newspapers he was thinking of organizing a special force to do nothing but track down whiskey camps and catch bootleggers on the roads and the beaches. Nobody needs
that
—not you, not Bellamy.”

“Shit,” Ed Ashley said. “Bobby Baker’s too busy anymore gettin his picture took by the newspapers at the openin of ever new bank and restaurant and hotel in the county. He anyhow dont give a shit what rummers do to each other, everbody knows that.”

Old Joe turned to John Ashley. “Boy?”

“I guess it’s worth it to try and make a deal.”

“You caint trust that sonofabitch!” Roy Matthews blurted. All
heads at the table turned his way. “I know what I’m talkin about. I done business with Bellamy before. He’ll cross us sure.”

“I know he kilt you friend, Roy,” Old Joe said softly. “But thats somethin between you and him and got nothin to do with business. This is business we’re talkin. Now, if the man
does
cross us, well, we’ll deal with that if the time ever comes.”

“It aint because of his friend,” Hanford Mobley said. “He just dont wanna run into his old bossman again.” He tucked his hands up under his armpits and flapped his arms like chicken wings. “Bawk-bawk-bawk.” He had never forgiven Roy Matthews for the business with the smoke rings and everybody knew it.

“You keep runnin you mouth, boy,” Roy Matthews said. “You just about to the edge with me.”

Hanford Mobley affected a look of fright—and then laughed and looked around at the others that they might join in.

“It’s enough of that, Hannie,” Old Joe said.

“You best listen to me on this,” Roy Matthews said, pointing a finger at Old Joe. “Bellamy’ll mean trouble to you some kinda way, you make me.”

“You made your point, boy,” Old Joe said, staring hard at him. He was not one to have a finger pointed at him or be told what he’d best do. Roy Matthews threw up his hands and looked away and said nothing more.

“All right, Gordy,” Old Joe said. “See to it.”

They met in a West Palm restaurant called The Clambake on a warm humid forenoon in latter May. Gordon Blue made the arrangements. They had a private backroom to themselves and sat at a long table bearing pots of coffee and baskets of biscuits and doughnuts. Nelson Bellamy and three of his men sat on one side of the table, and on the other, Old Joe Ashley and his boys Bill and John. As mediator, Gordon Blue sat at the head of the table. He was the only unarmed man in the room. Clarence Middleton had stayed outside with the car to act as lookout. He passed the time chatting with Bellamy’s driver about the best way to fish for snook.

Nelson Bellamy was tall and broadchested and hairy, and his suit coat was tight across his shoulders. Gold winked from his cufflinks, from his tie clasp, from a chain bracelet on his wrist, from a front tooth. He smoked cigarettes from a slim gold case he kept in his coat pocket. His right thumb was absent its forehalf. His eyes were dark and deep-set and moved constantly from one to another of the men
across the table. One of the men with him was James White. On entering the room and seeing him at the table John Ashley had grinned and said, “Hey Jimmy, how you keepin?” White had smiled slightly and nodded but said nothing. The other two men with Bellamy were introduced as Bo Stokes and Alton Davis. Davis—tall, ropy, acne-scarred—was Bellamy’s “chief of import operations.” Stokes was larger even than Bellamy, thicknecked and heavyshouldered, his blond hair cropped almost to the scalp, the bridge of his nose off-center. His duties were not explained, but Gordon Blue now told the Ashleys that Bo Stokes had two-and-a-half years ago fought Jack Dempsey in the ring. John Ashley grinned at this information and said to Stokes. “That so? Did you win?” and Old Joe laughed but not Bill. Stokes turned to gaze out the window like a man profoundly bored. In the manner of their employer all three of Bellamy’s men wore well-tailored suits, but all three were sunbrowned and scarred of hands and were clearly not indoor types.