Red Grass River (35 page)

“You can live or you can die, sonny,” Bob Baker said. “You dont put them hands way up right now, I know which it be.”

Hanford Mobley gave an instant’s thought to making a fight of it, to jumping aside as he drew his piece and they’d just see who lived and who died—and then remembered that the safety of his .45 was on and knew he’d never fire a shot before Bob Baker and Joe blew his head off.

He put his hands way up.

The store clerk came across the street to the depot to see what all the excitement was about and learned that the Palm Beach County high sheriff and his deputies had just captured two members of the
notorious Ashley Gang. A porter told him that the sheriff had asked the little one over there getting the chains put on him hand and foot where the other two were and the bandit had said it’d be a cold day in hell before he ever ratted.

The clerk presented himself to the Palm Beach sheriff and said he’d seen something that probably didnt have anything to do with this but he thought he ought to know it anyway—and he told Sheriff Baker about the man he’d seen jump aboard the freight train.

Fifteen minutes later Sheriff Baker had contacted the Duval County Sheriff and given him a thorough description of Roy Matthews—who was yet but an unidentified suspect. The Duval sheriff said he’d post men at the freight yard to watch for the train’s arrival and agreed not to arrest the suspect right away if they saw him. Rather, they would do as Sheriff Baker suggested and follow him to see if he might lead them to the fourth member of the holdup team. The Duval sheriff said he’d be in touch as soon as he had something to report.

Bob Baker now borrowed a car from the high sheriff of Hills-borough County so the Padgett brothers could transport Clarence Middleton to the hospital at West Palm Beach. One side of Clarence’s faced was hugely and darkly swollen and his articulation was reduced to a guttural groan. He was manacled hand and foot and put in the front passenger seat of the car and Joel Padgett sat directly behind him with a shotgun muzzle pressed to the back of his head. Elmer Padgett got behind the wheel and looked at Clarence and said, “Hey, bubba, is it true what they say in the adventure books about the outlaw life bein so much fun?” Joel Padgett laughed and poked Clarence sharply in the back of the head with the shotgun muzzle. Clarence turned and glared at him with eyes so bloodshot they looked like cranberries. Joe jabbed the muzzle lightly against his broken jaw and Clarence jerked back shrilling through his teeth. “You just face front and stay that way, tough guy,” Joe Padgett said.

Bob and Fred Baker took Mobley with them. Before heading back to the east coast Sheriff Bob contacted the sheriff of Broward County and asked if he might house a special prisoner in his jail for a time. The Palm Beach County lockup was undergoing renovations and its security would be frail until the construction work was finished. The Broward sheriff said to bring the rascal on down.

During the drive to Lauderdale Bob and Fred Baker chatted with each other about their families and about a fishing trip to Lake Okeechobee they were planning for upcoming weekend. They were in such high spirits they couldn’t keep from laughing, whether anything was
funny or not. Hanford Mobley sat in the backseat with his ankles cuffed against the frame of the front seat and his hands manacled behind him. So completely was he ignored by the lawmen he might not have been in the car with them. Only twice did they pay him heed, the first time was about midway through the trip when Bob Baker adjusted the mirror to look at him and laugh hard and then repositioned the mirror off him again. The other time was when Freddie Baker turned to look at him and grinned and then suddenly lunged and punched him just under the right eye.

Mobley saw stars and his eyes welled with tears and he cursed Freddie Baker for a son of a bitch.

“That’s enough now,” Bob Baker said, glancing casually at Fred Baker.

“Shit-eatin son of a nigger bitch,” Hanford Mobley said.

“You
hear
this little boy’s mouth?” Freddie said.

Without turning to look at him, Bob Baker told Hanford Mobley that if he didnt keep his trap shut for the rest of the drive he’d gag him with a piss-soaked oilrag balled in his mouth.

Hanford Mobley snorted but kept mute the rest of the trip.

The Ashley grapevine brought Old Joe the word about Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton even as Clarence was being manacled to a bed in the West Palm Beach hospital where he would have his broken jaw wired and be under round-the-clock guard by armed deputies. Old Joe told Bill Ashley to get Ira Goldman up to Twin Oaks immediately. That evening the three of them talked well into the night. On the following afternoon the assistant state’s attorney announced that John Clarence Middleton had been charged with bank robbery and his arraignment was set for the day after tomorrow. The prisoner’s trial and the state was happy to oblige. Trial was scheduled to begin in two weeks.

“Good,” Old Joe said when Ira and Bill reported how things stood. “I wish they was tryin him tomorrow.” They had recently come to secret agreement with Assistant Warden Webb at Raiford—at a price of twelve thousand dollars for John Ashley and five thousand for Ray Lynn. The underwarden had enlisted into the plan a trusted guard and one of the drivers of the trucks that delivered limestone to the rockpile twice a month. The confederates’ cut would come out of Webb’s seventeen thousand, which was part of the reason his price was so high. The rest of the reason was John Ashley’s notoriety and the fact that
his escape had to be from inside the walls. Assistant Warden Webb had the authority to assign Ray Lynn to a road gang—from which escape was easier—but could not reassign John Ashley, whom the warden was sworn to keep inside the penitentiary for the full length of his sentence. The underwarden told Ira Goldman that John Ashley’s escape could be effected only on one of the two days each month that the limestone trucks delivered to the prison. The plan depended on the truck. That was find with Old Joe, but he wanted Ray Lynn—and now Clarence, as well—to make their break from the road camp at the same time John was slipping out of the pen. If John got free too soon before Ray and Clarence, the warden might get the idea of locking them up in isolation to keep them from getting away too.

“I want Clarence up in Raiford just as quick as we can get him there,” Old Joe said to Ira. “Go see that Webb fella again and tell him hold off on John till Clarence is up there too and can come out with the Lynn boy.”

“It’ll cost more to include Clarence,” Ira Goldman said. “The bastard will probably want another five.”

“I know it,” Old Joe said. “Offer three and settle at five if you have to. Five’s way more than enough and he knows it. But he’s got to wait for Clarence. That’s the condition.”

Hanford Mobley he could help more directly and immediately. When he heard that Mobley was being put in the Broward County Jail Old Joe grinned like he’d been told a good joke and Ira Goldman asked him what was so funny.

“You know W. W. Hicks?” Joe said, looking from Ira Goldman to Bill Ashley. “Either you?”

They neither one did.

“Well, I do,” Old Joe said. And he laughed again. “Knowed him from the time he was a pup and his daddy and me used to fire-hunt deer together in the Big Cypress.”

“Who is W. W. Hicks, daddy?” Bill Ashley said.

“The night jailer at the Broward County lockup.”

Hanford Mobley had been in the Broward lockup three days when W. W. Hicks sidled up to the bars of his cell late in the evening and introduced himself as a friend of his granddaddy’s and said he’d spoken with Old Joe earlier that day. He informed Mobley that as the night jailer he was authorized to appoint two inmates every evening to the jail cleanup detail. “You know,” Hicks whispered, “if a inmate on the cleanup detail was to somehow overpower the guard and tie him up,
and if he was to get aholt of a small crowbar, and if he was to know that one of the skylights in the storeroom off the other hallway got a real old rusty lock on it, and if he was to boost hisself up to that lock some kinda way, why, he’d probably be able to bust it open with no trouble at all. Then he’d be up on the roof and would find out that in a back corner of it is a drainpipe he could skinny down. Then he’d likely do well to get his ass into the swampwoods back of the jail and make his way to Turtle Creek and follow it about two miles to the intracoastal. If he was real lucky he might could find him a skiff there. Then he’d like as not pole his way up through that mangrove channel where not even the dogs could follow in case the jailbreak had been found out and a posse was after him. Once he got past the mangroves he’d practically be to Pompano and if he was to put in at Skeet Massey’s fish camp there, why, it might not be too much of a surprise to have somebody waitin there for him in a car.”

Hanford Mobley was smiling. “You can put
me
on the cleanup detail?”

“Like as not your sheriff dont know thing one about how the sheriff runs things here,” Hicks said. “And for a fact my sheriff aint give a whole lot of thought to you—you not bein one of his own prisoners and all. What I’m gettin at is, aint nobody said to me you
caint
be on the detail.”

“Well now damn,” Hanford Mobley said, his smile wider.

“You feel like maybe doin some cleanup work round here tomorrow night?” Hicks said, smiling back at him. “You know, make yourself useful?”

“I always was raised to believe that cleanliness is next to godliness,” Hanford Mobley said.

The Duval County sheriff had posted men at the station to watch for anybody coming in on the freight from Tampa, especially somebody riding in a stockcar. The sheriff was proud of his law enforcement heritage—his daddy had been a respected sheriff of DeSoto County for years and his grandfather had been a deputy sheriff in Pensacola and part of the team that captured the notorious Texas desperado John Wesley Hardin at the train station there in the summer of 1877.

He was shrewd, this sheriff. He figured anybody riding the freightcars might think to jump off before the train pulled into the railyard. So he and a deputy, both of them in civilian dress, hiked a half-mile up the railway and hid themselves, one on either side of the
tracks, on a sandy rise in the pines from which they could see along the rails a good long way.

When the train appeared far down the track they watched it closely but nobody jumped off as it came toward them. Then the train was rumbling by and they both saw the slatted stockcar flash past and if anyone was in it neither of them saw him. And then the train was past and no one had jumped off and just as the sheriff and his deputy were dusting themselves and about to step out of the pines, the deputy said “Look!” and pointed up the tracks and the sheriff looked just in time to see a man tumbling in the grass alongside the rails. The sheriff and deputy quickly got back into the cover of the trees and watched as the man rose stiffly and stepped about gingerly and tested his limbs and seemed to find himself hale. He was too far away for them to compare him to the description they’d been given but the sheriff was sure he was their man. The suspect looked up and down the tracks and peered hard at the woods flanking both sides of the rails and then set out at a quick pace along the tracks toward Jacksonville.

They followed at a distance but kept to the edge of the woods and faded into the cover of the trees every time the suspect turned to look over his shoulder. As they drew close to town the man veered from the tracks and took to a narrow dirt path through the pines and the sheriff and his deputy closed their distance from him now that they were better hidden in the shadowed woods. The suspect seemed less wary and but infrequently looked back anymore.

When they got into town they kept a couple of blocks back of him. Then he went into a drug store and they quickly closed the distance and the deputy took up a position on the opposite side of the street and from there watched the front door. The sheriff lit his pipe and casually strolled past the drug store and glanced in the window as he went by the he saw the suspect talking on the telephone and smiling and saw that he fit exactly the description he’d been given by the Palm Beach sheriff. A minute later the man was outside again. He looked at a piece of paper in his hand and looked around and got his bearings and set out toward the river. The sheriff and the deputy, one on either side of the street, followed at a block’s distance.

Forty minutes later they were in a residential neighborhood near the river and the man stopped before a large Victorian house that had been converted to rooms to let. He checked the piece of paper in his hand once more and then went up the front steps and onto the porch and knocked on the door. The main door opened and he spoke to someone just the other side of the screen door. Now the door swung
open and he went in and the screen door closed and then the main door behind it.

They waited ten minutes and then went around to the kitchen side door and knocked and the sheriff showed his badge to a shapeless woman who said she was the cook. She let them in and went to fetch the house manager. He was a bespectacled man of middle years and in answer to the sheriff’s question said that the man who’d come in just ahead of them had been expected by one of the tenants, a young woman who’d received a telephone call from him a little earlier. Her room was on the second floor, number 222.

They ascended the stairs and moved softly down the hall and stopped at room 222 and drew their pistols. The sheriff put his ear to the door and listened for a moment and grinned at the deputy. He backed away from the door and mouthed the question “Ready?” and the deputy tugged his hat down and gripped his gun tightly in both hands and nodded. The sheriff raised his booted foot and delivered a powerful kick to the door that burst it off its lock and they rushed into the shrieking room.

“They say the Matthews boy went ten feet straight in the air when the door bust open,” the day jailer said. He was a fat man named Glover who never stopped sweating. He was leaning on the cell bars and fanning himself with his hat. “They say he stood there with his hands stickin up in the air and his dick stickin out in front of him all shiny with pussy juice.”