“Stop and think about it. Would you do that for me, J.P.? Maybe. I sure hope so. But neither of us will know until the time comes. And maybe I’d do it for you, and I hope I would, but there’s no telling. What I do know is, Homer did it for me: he risked everything he had for me. He was willing to die or spend the rest of his life in the Indiana state pen, all for me. That’s the bravest thing, I think: not to be brave for yourself but for a buddy when it gets you nothing and costs you everything.”
“Homer would be happy that you spoke so well of him,” said J.P.
“It’s the only epitaph someone in our business gets.”
They went quiet for a bit, as Les worked on the Coca-Cola. But Les wasn’t quite done.
“Here’s the other thing. Homer leaps into the car, he’s the getaway driver, and he catches something in the head and it knocks him out cold. Johnny pulls him over and climbs behind the wheel, and he’s the one who saves everybody’s bacon. In less than two months, both are gone. These guys weren’t fools. They didn’t make mistakes. Nothing random was going to get them. They weren’t going to be shot by the kid in the gas station or even get picked up on a drunk-driving charge. So if they go down, they go down because somebody squealed them out. And who would know where they were—in two different cities, no less. Who? Helen, can you answer that? J.P.? Come on, you’re smart, you’ve been around. Who?”
“It doesn’t make any sense, Les. Why would the Italians turn on us? As long as we’re getting the headlines, nobody notices them taking over the wires, the unions, the pictures, the banks even. They need us. That’s why they let us stay at their safe houses, armor up from their weapons rooms, sleep with—excuse me, Helen—a Mob trixie. And I don’t mean Les, Helen, he’s as true as a cowboy.”
“I know that, J.P. That’s why I love him so much.” She reached out and put her hand on her husband’s wrist. He patted it but was not done with his riff.
“I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know who’s doing it. But one guy is making this happen. I will find him. I will pay him back.”
—
LES’S DEPRESSION DIDN’T CLEAR, even if he had returned to talkativeness. But inside, where the little wheels were, those wheels were whirring and buzzing and rattling like crazy, so that even if he was joking with Helen, or fucking her, even if he was out on the prairie working on his shooting skills—say, he was damned good, getting better!—he had that issue somewhere in his brain. He knew he couldn’t move until he figured it out.
One day, he took a fiver to the bank, asked for quarters, walked through San Antonio until he found a phone booth in an out-of-the-way spot, and dipped in.
“Number, please.”
“I’d like to put through a call to Reno, Nevada. Enterprise 5487.”
“Yes sir. That’ll be two dollars and twenty-five cents for the first three minutes.”
“Got it.”
He fed in nine quarters and waited.
“Yeah?”
“Long Distance. I have a call for this number from a . . . What is your name, sir?”
“Les Smith.”
“Les—”
“It ain’t collect?”
“No sir.”
“Fine, I’ll take it . . . Les?”
“Skabootch? Is that you?”
“No, Les, it’s Doc Bone. How are you, kid?”
“I’m fine, Doc. This line clean?”
“Yeah, the heat’s off for now. It comes, it goes—who knows why? Listen, you want Skabootch?”
“It doesn’t matter, Doc. I need a favor, nothing big, just some help.”
“Sure, kid. Ask, it’s yours.”
“You heard about Homer going down?”
“Yeah, a shame. Good man. I heard they chopped him bad.”
“Bastards. Anyhow, here’s what I need to know. You must have friends who have friends who have connections with St. Paul Homicide.”
“If I don’t, Skabootch does. He don’t, Soap would.”
“Well, whoever.”
“What’s up, kid?”
“I have to know how it happened. It’s the Division that’s got the itch for us, and Homer thought he was home free in St. Paul. No Division there. But he gets burned by coppers with choppers. So I have to know if there was anything going on? Any new players, any decisions made on high, just what the hell happened that guys he’s palled around with suddenly park a drum on him. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it was just bad luck, kid.”
“Nobody’s luck is that bad. Ask around for me, will you, Doc?”
“Sure, kid. You call me back tomorrow, this time, this number, maybe I’ll have something for you by then.”
“You’re the best, Doc. I knew I could count on you.”
So that buoyed Les up for a night, and he took Helen dancing in one of her new dresses, and then to a picture, and then took her back to the room and fucked her good. He awoke in good spirits too, and at the appointed hour, in a different booth, he put the call through to Doc Bone. But this time he got Skabootch.
“Yeah, Les, I know what you’re after. Kid, some advice. You got friends out here, you’re loved for your talent and guts, maybe you ought to give up on Chicago for a while. It ain’t healthy. We could put you to work.”
“In a few months when I get this stuff straightened out, maybe then. I could see it, Helen and me, J.P. too, we’d like it out there permanent.”
“You always got a place here.”
“Anyway—”
“Well, here’s what I found out. It was three St. Paul detectives, plus some other guy. It must have been important, because one of the shooters was the chief himself, Cullen, and another was Brown, who’d been the chief, but is in all kinds of soup for taking bribes, and maybe even going on out-of-state jobs with certain individuals.”
“The other guy? The fourth guy?”
“There’s your million-dollar mystery. It was some tall guy, always wore a fedora, always looked buttoned-up and official. Hard eyes—man-killer eyes—the three treated him like a guy who had to be respected. Wasn’t introduced to other cops by Cullen, so nobody knows. Disappeared right after the shooting, no mention of him to press or even to other coppers. The three on the job kept it to themselves, and nobody’s got the balls to ask ’em. Nobody knows.”
But Les knew in a second. It was the Western gunfighter who’d stood tall and straight on the hill off Wolf Road, while Les’s slugs tore up the earth around him, and fired a handgun from a hundred yards that missed Les’s head by an inch.
“Okay, Skabootch, thanks. Yeah, now I see. Now I know what I got to do.”
45
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
“SO THE DOCUMENT is back in the archives?” Bob asked.
“Yes, but retrievable when we need it,” said Nick.
Rawley was the smart one on tech, and he had the StingRay cell site simulator, which impersonated a cell tower. It gets the call attempt, analyzes it, and passes it along to a real cell tower. It’s a highly advanced Gen 7 femtocell, small and portable, able to decrypt both sides of a cell call using NSA intercept software. It was about the size of a shoe box, had thirteen numbered LED displays, with up-and-down switches next to each, labeled “Target Phone,” and another thirteen digits underneath, labeled “Connected Phone.” The thirteenth made it feasible for deployment against foreign units. “On/Off” switch, self-contained speaker with volume control. Jack for headphone. He could tune into radio station WBOB anytime he was within two miles.
He sat in the back of the rented Chevy SUV parked in a McLean strip mall and had his program locked in, the device on his lap. It wasn’t your garden-variety, Amazon-bought toy, and where the two-hundred-dollar Amazon job would have said SAMSUNG, this $119,000-per-unit said PROP OF US GOVT and AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY. It
was a state-of-the-art, military-grade penetration device, top secret, and carried by serial number in the inventory of the 465th Security Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, Military Police Detachment, Pine Bluff Arsenal, which was responsible for making sure none of the army’s stores of white-phosphorus munitions ended up in terrorist hands. Pine Bluff Arsenal was about sixty-five miles southwest of Little Rock, and it was on Rawley’s lap, courtesy of the battalion’s commanding officer, who had been discovered in a compromising situation on one of Rawley and Braxton’s recent adventures, something about a dancer in one of Mr. Kaye’s strip joints in West Little Rock while the wife was out of town.
The genius of the system was that the phone didn’t even have to be on for them to listen in. It was as if Bob was broadcasting, from wherever he went. But there were limits, if only to their own patience. They listened in whenever Bob was with anyone. Of course it made no sense to listen to Bob when he was by himself, as he didn’t talk to himself, or God, or an imaginary girlfriend, or a large white rabbit. So they stayed far away, over the horizon in those situations, and listened only when he made phone calls and whatnot. But the sessions with Nick were pure gold because that’s when he unloaded all his fears, his doubts, his frustrations.
“Okay . . . the way . . . you want to play . . . I’d get moving . . . form recognition . . . how bur . . . can be.”
“I have to figure out the best route through all this, how to use the new confirmation. What do I owe Charles? What do I owe the Bureau? What do I owe history?”
“When you see it . . . you’ll know it.”
Rawley and Braxton found this whole thing very interesting. It was the primitive power of narrative. Everybody loves a story and wants to know how it comes out. The saga of the strange Arkansas gunman in Chicago in the middle of the gangster war provoked them.
But there was so much to learn. Why had Charles been eliminated from FBI records? Why had he returned home in seeming shame from Chicago? Why had his life then gone into a downward spiral until he was a drunk, bitter, isolated, indifferent to his wife and son? And why had he died the way he did? All that mystery was unpenetrated. And was liable to remain unpenetrated.
“It’s impossible,” said Bob, “since no one is left alive from those days except that old lady, and she didn’t know much except that he had the smell of whiskey on him and a bandage on his ear. The kind of stuff he did, there were no records, no documents, no photos, no witness accounts, nothing. No place to go at all.”
Braxton was by this time an expert on dialogue between Nick and Bob, its nuances, its leitmotifs, its subtexts, its Mametian elisions, and he said to Rawley, “He wasn’t much on his game today. They’ve had better conversations. What was the point of going through it all over again? What even was the point of the meeting?”
They both knew Bob had called the meeting and had rushed to get there. But, for what? For this? Made no sense.
“Maybe he’s losing it. He got a big breakthrough this morning and it’s got him all mixed up. He’s supposed to be so smart. I have to laugh. He’s a dumber hillbilly than we are, Rawley. He still don’t get who we are. He only has a suspicion he’s been targeted, and he ain’t making no progress at all. Mr. Kaye’s going to be disappointed. He backed the wrong horse, and the Russians are going to send him for a deep dive in an Arkansas lake.”
Rawley smiled once for seven-tenths a second. That was his way of saying he thought that was pretty funny. It also might have communicated the message that he knew something Swagger didn’t.
—
“SO THE DOCUMENT is back in the archives?” Bob said, and slid a handwritten note to Nick.
Nick read the note, and then said, “Yes, but retrievable when we need it.”
The note said “Can you check with technical people on iPhone-penetration technologies. Could mine be compromised? It’s never been out of my possession and yet I get the being-followed vibe every time I’m with somebody—like now, for example. Then, when I’m alone, I get nothing. So somehow they KNOW when there’ll be chatter and when there won’t. And when there won’t, they minimize the chance of discovery by disappearing.”
“Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it. I’d get moving on the recognition issue, though. You know how bureaucracies can be,” said Nick, and wrote a response.
“I’ll call Jeff Neill. I’m not up on this stuff, but I know it’s a big item in security circles.”
Bob continued with the chatter. “I have to figure out the best route through all this, how to use the new confirmation. What do I owe Charles? What do I owe the Bureau? What do I owe history?”
When Bob was done, Nick said, “But someone believes you’re going to solve the mystery and find a treasure in guns or bills worth millions. Else why would they be following you?” During that time, Bob wrote, “Thanks. It has to be the phone. Nothing else capable of receiving and sending information is on me—no cards with chips, no GPS, my watch is fifteen years old, nothing.”
46
EAST LIVERPOOL, OHIO
October 22, 1934
IT HAPPENED FAST. The day before, Charles got the message from Uncle Phil to call him and four minutes later the mystery gangster told him that something had just broken. Someone at a pool hall near East Liverpool swore that Pretty Boy Floyd and his pal Adam Richetti had just shown up, looking like hobos, and asked the owner, Joy, for some food and a place to rest. Joy obliged but gave the nod, as the word was out that certain people were very interested in Pretty Boy. So the news reached Charles, Charles was telling Sam, and at that moment the Director called Sam, said that in Cincinnati Purvis had gotten a call from the sheriff of Columbiana County, Ohio, that they were closing in on Pretty Boy Floyd somewhere outside of the selfsame East Liverpool. It was all coming together on Pretty Boy.
The news was that Pretty Boy, Richetti, and two frails, the Baird sisters, were traveling from somewhere out East back to the Midwest. They were probably going to lay over in East Liverpool, since it was an area Pretty Boy had worked when he was just the hillbilly Charlie Floyd from the Cookson Hills, in Oklahoma. It was years before he became, as he had on Dillinger’s death, Public Enemy No. 1, and a priority for a Division that wanted him to pay the bill for the Kansas City Massacre, where two of its agents were gunned down. That had been a great Career Move for Charlie, putting him on the map in a way his somewhat obtuse mind would not have permitted, the irony being that while it made him famous, he actually hadn’t been there. He’d killed over ten men, was as bold as they came, if that dumb too, a superb shot and cunning gunfighter, and liked the fame, even if he had to explain to everybody that he would never turn the Thompson loose on anybody, even cops and Division men sitting in a car.
Anyhow, just outside of East Liverpool, a wide-open town on the Ohio side of the big river forty miles west of Pittsburgh, Charlie had managed to crack up in a ditch. Stupid is as stupid does. None of the other big bank guys ever made such a dumb-ass move and ended up like these two, wandering the countryside, waiting for the two girls (who’d walked into town) to pick up some transportation and come fetch them. Another irony was that as satisfying as it was for Charlie to be number one on the Director’s list, it also meant he was movie-star famous and couldn’t flash his mug just anywhere, as in the old days.
Once it became known that Public Enemy No. 1 was in play, things pretty much turned into a carnival, East Ohio river town–style. The sheriff and a couple deputies ran into Charlie and Adam, had a nice little gunfight with them, the result being that Adam was captured, and Charlie dropped his Tommy gun, but, slippery as ever, somehow ran into the Appalachian woods and got away. He wandered a bit, caught a ride, almost got nailed at a roadblock, skipped out again, and spent the night shivering in the forest.
By today, the Division had flooded the place with agents from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago, under the nominal control of Purvis, up by plane from Cinc
y, who was a little unsure how to handle the situation. He ended up with five cars full of agents more or less roaming the countryside, while two hundred local cops and State policemen set up roadblocks or did their own roaming. Cops were everywhere, and it was just a matter of time before the bedraggled Charlie ran into them or they ran into him.
Swagger ended up with twelve pounds of drummed-up Thompson gun on his lap in the backseat of a Dodge as it prowled and pawed up and down the dirt roads of Columbiana County, just north of East Liverpool, through a melee of autumn coloration, the season wearing its full glory. Ahead of him, wearing overcoats, scarves, fedoras, sat Purvis and Ed Hollis. Hollis was behind the wheel, while Sam McKee, out of the Cleveland Office, sat next to Charles. He had a Winchester pump riot gun, a dangerous piece of equipment, but unlike so many of the kids, he was a disciplined former police officer and wouldn’t accidentally shoot his or anybody else’s foot off. Behind them, another sedan carried four somewhat disgruntled and perhaps untrustworthy East Liverpool cops, including that department’s chief.