“What’d he look like?”
“Like I say, Mr. Maddox, old man. Face like a bag of prunes. Big old man. Sad-like. He looked like he seen his kids drownded in a flood. Didn’t say much. But he was some sort of boss. Meanwhile, the tough guy supervised the cracking of the tables, and outside, Becker and his clerk handed out them news releases, answered some questions, posed for pictures. Then they all up and went. Nobody made no arrests.”
“Hmmmm,” said Owney. He had been caught flat-footed, and someone smart somewhere was behind it. That old man chopping at the walls. He was clearly someone who knew what he was doing. He had a sense of the one place Owney was vulnerable. You could raid on places in Hot Springs for years, and as soon as you closed one joint down, another would spring up, sustained by the river of money that was track betting. But the old man was looking for the wiring that would indicate the secret presence of the Central Book, where the phones poured their torrents of racing data, and Owney knew if he found it, he could dry Owney out in a fortnight.
Goddamn the wire! He was trying to get out of that business but he was still tied to it, it was still his lifeline, and he was still vulnerable to its predation.
One thing was for sure: next time he’d be ready.
“Jack, get Pap in here.”
When the old man came, Owney went to the point.
“I want ’em all armed now. Nothing goes easy anymore. They’ll never have it as soft as they had it tonight. If they want a war, we’ll give ’em a goddamned war. They got guns? We’ll get bigger guns. Tell the Grumleys, they will get back for what was done to them tonight.”
“Wooo-oooooooo-doggies!” yelped the haggard old sinner, and danced a mad little jig there in the ruined casino.
14
By three separate cars, the raid team arrived at the courtyard of the Best Tourist Court at around 9:30 P.M. The neon of the Best was spectacular: it washed the night in the fires of cold gas, in odd colors like magenta and fuchsia and rose around each cabin. It looked like a frozen explosion.
In this strange illumination, the men loaded magazines quietly, slipped into their bulletproof vests, checked the safeties, locked back actuators, tried to stay loose and cool and not get too excited. But it was hard.
Across the street they could see the looming shape of the old ice house, and next to it, the Horseshoe itself, somewhat rickety and wooden like most of the casinos built in the 1920s, with its blazing neon sign thirty feet high atop the roof: 30 SLOTS—INSTANT PAYOUT! and the double green neon horseshoes at each end of the sign.
“Hard to miss,” said D.A.
“It’s not like a secret or nothing,” said one of the boys, possibly Eff—for Jefferson—up from the Georgia Highway Patrol. A designated tommy gunner, he was loading .45s into a stick magazine.
Earl was alive in ways he hadn’t been alive for a year. He felt his eyeballs extra-sharp, he tasted the flavor of the air, his nerve endings were radar stations reading every rogue movement in the night sky. He walked around, checking, examining, giving this boy or that the odd nod or pat of encouragement.
Becker pulled in, with a clerk. He seemed especially nervous. He walked among the men smiling dryly, but he kept running his tongue over his gray lips. All he could think to say was “Very good, very good, very good.”
Finally he approached the two leaders.
“I like it. They look sharp,” he said.
“It ought to go okay,” said the old man.
“You, Earl, you agree?”
“Mr. Parker’s got it laid out real nice, sir,” said Earl.
“Okay. When it’s clear, you send a boy out. At that moment I’ll call HSPD and announce a raid in progress and request backup. Then I’ll call the newspaper boys. I did alert the Little Rock boys to have a photog in the area. But that’s okay, that’s secure. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” said D.A., but suddenly Earl didn’t like it. Okay, Owney owned the local rags, but how safe were these Little Rock people? He pulled D.A. aside.
“I’m going to go in early,” he said.
D.A. looked at him.
“You’ll be right in the line of fire for twelve nervous kids.”
“Yeah, but in case somebody in there gets a little crazed or has been tipped off, I might be able to cock him good and save a life or two. This’ll probably be the only raid we can get away with that.”
“I don’t like it, Earl,” D.A. said. “It’s not how we planned it. It could confuse them.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Earl. “It could save some lives.”
“It could cost some lives too,” said D.A.
“Look at it this way,” said Earl. “We’ll never get a chance to pull this trick off again. They’ll be waiting for it in all the other places. We might as well do it while we can.”
D.A. looked at him sharply, seemed about to say something, but then reconsidered; it was true he did not want a killing on the first raid, for he believed that would turn the whole enterprise inevitably toward ruination.
“Wear your vest,” he cautioned, but even as he said it, he knew it was impossible: the vests were large and bulky and looked like umpire’s chestpads, and everybody hated them. If Earl walked in with a vest on, it would be a dead giveaway.
“You know I can’t.”
“Yeah, well, take this.”
He handed over a well-used police sap, a black leather strap with a pouch at the end where a half pound of buckshot had been secreted.
“Bet you busted some head with this old thing,” said Earl with a smile.
“More’n I care to remember.”
Earl looked at his Hamilton in the pink light and shadow. It was 9:45. Between the tourist court and the casino, Ouachita Avenue buzzed with cars.
“I’m sending in three teams in the front and two in the back,” said D.A. “I’ll move the rear teams in first. I’ll run them teams around the ice house, and they’ll rally in its eaves, on that southwest corner. At 9:59, they’ll move single file down to the rear entrance. We have sledges. At ten, they hit the door, just as the three front-entry teams go through the foyer and fan out through the building. Luckily it’s a simple building, without a lot of blind spots or tiny rooms.”
Earl nodded.
“That’s good,” he said. “But maybe instead of going around the ice house, you ought to move ’em around the other side of the casino, sir.”
D.A. looked at him.
“Why?” he said.
“It’s nothing. But the manager’s office seems to be upstairs on that same corner. Maybe he’s up there, the window’s open, and he hears scuffling in the alley, or somebody drops a mag or bangs into a garbage can. Maybe it ticks something off in him, he takes out a gun, he heads downstairs. The rear-entry team runs into him with a gun out on the stairway. Bang, bang, somebody’s hurt bad. See what I’m saying, sir? I think you’d do best to run ’em around that other side of the building.”
“Earl, is there anything you don’t know?”
“What to name my kid. How to balance a checkbook. Which way the wind blows.”
“You are a smart bastard. All right.”
Earl checked his .45, making sure once again that the safety was still on, and, from the heft, that indeed the piece was stoked with seven cartridges. He touched the three mags he had tucked into his belt on the back side. He touched his sap.
Then he went among the boys.
“Listen up, kids,” he said.
They stopped fiddling with their tommy guns and drew around him.
“Slight change in plan. I’m going to go on and be in there. I have a favor to ask. Please do not shoot me. You especially, Short. Got that?”
There was some nervous laughter.
“Okay, I’ll be in the main room, at the bar. Mark me. If I move fast, it’s because I’ve seen someone with a gun or a club. I say again and now hear this: Do not shoot old Mr. Earl.”
Again, the dry laughter of young men.
“You are broken d
own into your teams, you have your staging assignments and your route assignments. And remember. The fight’s going to be what it wants to be, not what you want it to be. You stay sharp,” and he moved away from them and disappeared.
• • •
Frenchy was annoyed. The last man on the last team. He was backup on the rear-entry team, the third fire team. That made him sixth man through the door. It did get him a tommy gun, however. He felt it wrapped under his coat as he crossed Ouachita, huge, oily and powerful. He waited for the cars to part, then dashed across, as the others had done, one man at a time, the tommy gun secured up under his suit coat, the heavy armored vest rocking against him as he ran. No car lights shone on him; nobody from the Horseshoe saw him, or could be expected to.
He ran to the Horseshoe’s northwest corner, then threaded back alongside the west wall of the casino. Inside he could hear the steady clang of the slots, the calls of the pit bosses and the more generalized hubbub of a reasonably crowded place.
He slid along the edge of the building, ducking the wash of lights that shone from the shuttered windows. His eyes craned the parking lot to his right for movement, but there was none at all. Five men had passed this way before him, and at last he joined them, in a little cluster at the southwest corner of the big, square old building.
“Six in,” he said.
“Time check,” said Slim, who as the second-most-senior man of the unit was running the rear-entry team. Slim was a heavyset, quiet fellow from Oregon, a State Trooper out there. He was one of three actual gunfight veterans on the team.
“2150,” said his number two, Bear.
“Okay, let’s hold here,” Slim said, trying to control his breathing. “We’ll move to the door at 2158.”
They hunched, tensing, feeling the sultry weight of the air. It was all going so fast. Getting across the street and reassembling at the rallying point seemed much simpler than it was supposed to be. No screwups at all.
“One last time, let’s go over assignments. I’m one; when the door goes, I pile through it first, with my .45, covering the right side of the rear hall, turning right, moving into the main room and covering the right again.”
Two, three and four ran through their assignments, droning on about turns to left or right and sectors to cover with pistol or tommy gun.
“I’m five,” said Henderson finally. “I go down the hall, past the casino, turn right, take the stairs up to the manager’s office, which I cover. Securing that, I work the men’s and women’s rooms.”
“I’m six,” said Frenchy. “I grab the blonde, I fuck her fast, then I spray the room with lead, killing everybody, including you guys. Then I light up a smoke and wait for the newspaper boys and my Hollywood contract.”
“All right, Frenchy,” said Slim. “Cut the shit. This ain’t no joke.”
“All right, all right,” said Frenchy. “I’m six. I support five up the rear stairs with the tommy, covering the left-hand side of the stairwell. I cover him in the manager’s office, and then we check the two rest rooms. I hope there’s a babe on the pot in the lady’s.”
“Cornhole,” someone muttered.
“Now what’s the last thing we heard?” asked Slim. “What should be freshest in our minds?”
There was stupefied silence.
“Damn, you guys already forgot! Mr. Earl is going to be in there. He’ll be at the bar. So you guys especially, three and four, you make sure you do not cover him. No accidents. Got that?”
Taking the silence as assent, he then said, “Time check?”
“Uh, 2157.”
“Shit, we’re late. Okay guys, single file, follow me. You ready with that sledge, Eff?”
“Yes I am.”
“Let’s move out.”
They scooted down the rear of the building and came to rest in the lee of the door. The alley was dark. All was silent.
“On the tommies, safeties off.”
Silently, the men found the safeties of their weapons and disengaged them, while three edged around with his sledge, getting ready to give the door a stout whack just above the handle.
Slim looked at his watch. The second had ticked around, until it reached straight up.
“Do it,” he said.
• • •
Earl stepped into a well-lighted space. It wasn’t nearly as crowded as the Ohio had been that night. A big guy eyed him as he walked through the doorway, clearly a muscleman or some kind of enforcer, but he was so close to the door he felt the palooka would have no chance to react when the fellows spilled through in a few minutes.
He moved on into the big room, which was simply the majority of the building. It was just a space to house the sucker-swindling machinery, decorated along horse-racing lines, with jerseys and crops and helmets and horsehoes festooning the walls. The lights were bright, the smoke heavy, and the slots were set against the walls where a number of weary pilgrims fed them coins to what appeared to be very little financial gain on their part. In the center of the room a couple of tables offered blackjack, there was a poker game going on but without much energy and a roulette wheel ticked off its reds and blacks as it spun to the amusement of another sparse crowd. But the main action was craps, where the players were louder and more excitable.
“Eighter, eighter, eighter from Decatur.”
“No, no, Benny Blue’s coming up, here comes the big Reno, I can feel it in my bones.”
Perhaps because it was built around dynamic movement, this game seemed to draw the most passion. Its players crowded round, and gave their all to the drama.
“Yoleven, yoleven, yoleven!”
Earl slid to the bar and ordered a beer, which was delivered by a plug-ugly without much sentimentality.
“First one’s on the house, long as it ain’t the last one.”
“Oh, it’s going to be a long night, trust me, brother,” said Earl, taking a sip of the brew.
He measured the bartender, who looked like a tough cracker and thought he might have to cool him out. When the man’s attention was on other customers, Earl snuck a peek down and under the bar, where he saw, among the bottles and napkins, a sawed-off pool cue, and a sawed-off 12-gauge pumpgun. The weapons were hung under the bar right next to the cash register. At 2159, Earl thought he’d mosey down and set up there.
Meanwhile, he scanned the crowd, looking for security types. So far only two: the big guy at the door and the barkeep. Maybe there was another someplace but he sure didn’t see him.
Smoke heaved and drifted in the bright room. He picked up his beer and moved on down to the cash register, until he was parked just above the cached weapons. The hand on the clock on the wall said ten o’clock, straight up.
• • •
Three’s sledge hit the door, rebounded once. He caught it and being a strong young Georgia vice detective, swung again, to the sound of wood shattering and ripping. A blade of light fell into the alley as the door was blasted from its hinges and fell wretchedly to one side.
The men scrambled in.
There was a sense of craziness to it, as they stumbled over each other and no one could quite get his limbs moving fast enough. Their eyes bugged as the hormones of aggression flooded through their bodies. They rushed along, bringing the guns to bear, looking hungrily for targets to kill.
Slim was shouting “Hands up! Hands up! This is a raid!” and others took up the call, “Raid! Raid! Raid!”
Frenchy had but a glimpse of the first two teams as they fanned out and dispersed into the casino’s main room. But he churned along in the wake of Carlo Henderson, his partner, who was strangely animated to grace by all the excitement and moved ahead purposefully, quickly found the right-hand stairwell, and began to assault the stairs, screaming “Raid! Raid! Hands up!”
Frenchy was with him when a man appeared at the top of the stairs. Frenchy knew in a second he’d shoot if Carlo weren’t in the way, but he couldn’t fire and he sat back waiting for Carlo’s shots to ring out. But Carlo didn’t
shoot.
“Hands up! Get those hands up and you won’t get hurt!” he screamed, thrusting his .45 in his two hands before him, aimed straight at the heart of the figure, who threw his hands skyward and went to his knees.
Carlo was next to him like some kind of sudden athlete, spun him, leaned him against the wall, spread him and searched him. A Colt .32 pocket model came out and was tossed down the stairwell.
“You stay put!” Carlo demanded, reached up, gracefully snagged the guy in one half a pair of cuffs, wound him quickly around and clipped the other wrist and sat him down with a thump. He was wearing a white tuxedo and Frenchy bet he’d be the manager.
Perhaps that’s why when the two men kicked open the casino manager’s office and scanned it quickly for threats, they found nothing.
“Clear!”
“Clear on my side!” replied Frenchy.
Next they did the washrooms. A fairly drunk guy was propped against the urinal; Frenchy gave him a nudge and he fell backward, spraying pee in a wide arc, but the two young policemen, though encumbered in vests and with weapons, were so horrified of the prospect of being splashed, they leapt back and missed the dousing. Frenchy felt a flare of rage, and stepped forward to club the drunk with his tommy gun butt, but Carlo interceded and brought him under control. The drunk lay in his own piss, screaming, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!”
“You stay here till we come get you,” Carlo screamed. Then he turned to Frenchy. “Come on, goddammit!”
They ducked next into the ladies’. It was clear, except for a closet, which they tried and found locked.
“Smash it?” asked Frenchy.
Carlo pulled really hard. It wouldn’t open.
“Yeah,” he said. “You smash it open since you want to hit something. I’m going to take that drunk and the guy in the tux downstairs before they run away.”
He disappeared.
Frenchy had a weird need to spray the door with the Thompson. Nah, he knew that would be wrong.
Instead, he beat at it until the jamb gave, and pulled it open. Nothing inside except a wash bucket and a mop.