The Austin Job (3 page)

“A hired informant. I got it. Sheesh. And I assume I’m not supposed to ask what that contraption was?”

Lickter nodded. “You’re supposed to tell me what Oleg’s got planned and get the hell out of here before we’re seen together.”

“It’s my ass on the line.”

“Report.”

Lickter’s mole kicked a discarded tin can with his boot. “There isn’t much. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

Using his imposing size, Lickter stepped close enough for the cocky greenling to smell the onions on his breath. “What the hell do you think I’ve been paying—”

“He’s been focusing everything on the auction, tomorrow.” the mole said.

“For the love of all things, I’m the one who told you that!”

“But…”

“But?” Lickter couldn’t believe this kid’s flare for the dramatic.

“He’s got us all gathering tonight.”

Lickter perked up. “A pep talk?”

“Maybe, but I think it’s something else.”

“What else?” Nearly throttling the kid, Lickter chose instead to run his hand under the brim of his hat. “Give me something I can work with. Where’s his lab?”

“I don’t know, okay. I’m working on it.”

“Working? Courting co-eds at a bar downtown—”

“Hey, she’s close to him,” the mole defended himself. “Anyway, we get further instructions tonight. All hands on deck. Trust me, this is it. He always gets like this just before.”

“Like what?”

“Angry. Self-righteous.” The mole shook his head. “The little prig. He keeps talking about the cleansing fires. I think he’s snapped.”

Lickter backed off and twiddled the toothpick dangling from his lips. “Alright, good job. But make sure you’re on time tomorrow. If this guy’s about to go off half-cocked, I need to know about it.”

Cheers and thunderous applause arose from the street. “That’s my cue.” The mole disappeared around the back of the building while Lickter crept cautiously toward the ruckus.

“Protestors.” Lickter surveyed the scene from behind empty vegetable crates. The crowd was over a hundred people and growing—a mixture of farmers on foot and horseback peppered with students. His mole popped out from the next alley down and joined their ranks without a hiccup.
The little pain in the ass is a good actor, I’ll give him that
.

It wasn’t until he himself decided to join the crowd that he spotted the focus of the adulation. The sight nearly caused him to bite his toothpick in half.

THREE

Warming Up

Before Starr could duck back into the restaurant, Oleg gripped him by the elbow. Twisting it, the diminutive professor slipped behind the much larger senator and levered him into the midst of the mob. Moments later cheering students had filled the void behind them. Oleg released his grip and smiled, waving to his fans with one hand and embracing Starr with the other.

In the time it took Starr to swallow the bite of sausage in his mouth, he’d been politically tied to an anarchist ringleader over the largest and most explosive issue of the day. It felt worse than drawing the local flea-bitten nag at the rodeo finals. Then at least he could’ve ridden out the eight seconds doing his best to put on an elaborate show for the crowd. Without any better ideas he decided to do just that. Rodchenko wasn’t the winning ride, but if he rode what he was given he might still taste prize money.

Smiling, he followed Rodchenko’s lead as the two men swam deeper into the cheering ocean, bobbing up and down amid chants and placards. Before he knew it, the human wave crested down Sixth Street, headed for Congress Avenue and the heart of the downtown financial district. The closer they got, the worse his scar twitched.

The angry contingent of tenant farmers represented the 53% of the farming profession statewide who worked land they didn’t own. After two straight years of terrible drought they’d been saddled with an untenable burden. The failure to produce even a salvageable crop of truck vegetables for the autumn would leave many of them starving while land owners threatened to remove tenants who couldn’t pull their weight. The young, including Starr’s little brother, joined the war effort in Europe, leaving the countryside to whither. Now Rodchenko seemed determined to provide the final spark, but he was going to get people hurt.

Two blocks from the Grandview building and the office where Starr worked, the crowd compressed, jolting him more violently. Tensions rose in direct relation to the opulence of their surroundings as cheers morphed into angry chants. Rodchenko’s grip tightened, refusing to release his trophy and dupe, until with crushing violence a blow from behind severed them.

Starr staggered sideways. A familiar voice joined the chanting masses as Sheriff Benjamin Lickter’s hand clutched him, helping him regain his balance. “A man should work the land he owns. A man should own the land he works!” Lickter clasped both Starr and Oleg in a bear hug, laying it on thick while whispering something into Oleg’s ear. By the time a half dozen students pried the professor free of the burly sheriff’s embrace, Lickter and Starr had distanced themselves from the heart of the mob.

“What the hell are you thinking?” Lickter moved the two of them toward the edge of the crowd via elbow jabs and ugly looks.

“He set me up. I fell for it.”

“I’ll say. Damn boy, I thought politicians were supposed to do the shucking.”

“Let’s just get out of here.” Starr said.

“Easier said than done, boy. We got trouble.” Chanting dissolved into mayhem as the wave of protesters crashed into the bases of the nine-story Grandview and Scarborough buildings and turned violent. Lickter ducked, covering the two of them as a store window shattered. “There ain’t enough lawmen in town to settle this.”

“What about the Rangers?”

“They’re off chasing the Motorcycle Mexican and dealing with the border.” Of course, Starr nodded and brushed glass from his hair. He’d followed the fugitive’s status over the last week—a goat herder turned icon for the rural worker.

“Maybe we can just ride it out.” Starr winced as gunfire punctuated his remark, a nervous deputy firing shots into the air. “Oh crap.”

After a pregnant pause, a volley of angry yells burst from the mob, followed by a scattering of rifles and shotguns returning fire. Like a mess of cockroaches disturbed by sudden movement, the crowd spilled into every alley, door and window. Whether the majority sought refuge or revenge, it made little difference. “We gotta do something!” Starr insisted as they crouched behind a Model T parked in front of the venerable Antler Hotel.

“
You
gotta do something.” The windshield shattered, spraying them again with glass. “They’re your crowd now.” Lickter held his pistol ready.

“Hey down there!” A woman’s voice rang out from above. “It looks like you two could use a line.”

“Dammit, Daisy.” Lickter cursed. “Can’t you stay out of harm’s way for half a day?”

“Not when I’m with you apparently.” The sheriff’s daughter tied the Antler Hotel’s plush, blackout curtains to the balcony railing. Lickter tripped a farmer racing past with a shotgun and snatched the weapon as the man skidded into the street. He fired the shotgun into the air while waiving his badge and gesturing upward toward the balcony.

A nearby deputy caught his drift and worked his way toward them. Starr lunged up the curtain hand over hand as Lickter emptied the shotgun over the heads of anyone showing threat. Tossing the gun, Lickter heaved himself up the curtain ladder next. No sooner than Starr’s boots had landed on the balcony he started hoisting the curtain upward, pulling the massive sheriff with it. From his elevated vantage he saw a clump of protestors standing like statues in the middle of the street, a bemused Oleg at their center.

Lickter reached the top railing and let go of his end of the curtain, sending Starr stumbling through the opened balcony door with the curtain still in his hands.

“Here, you might need this.” Daisy stood over him. Sitting up, he took the wire-mesh cylinder from her hand.

“What—”

 
“It’s a microphone,” Lickter responded. He tumbled over the railing as a bullet ricocheted above their heads. Starr’s cheeks puckered while Daisy crouched awkwardly over him. Her proximity re-simmered his emotional soup from the evening before. Eventually she helped both men up, one after the other.

“And that?” Starr pointed to a large box on wheels connected to the contraption in his hand via a long electrical wire.

“You don’t wanna know.” Daisy rolled her eyes while giving Starr a peck on the cheek, the brush of her lips making him flush.

“That, my boy, is called a radiola. One don’t do much good without the other.” Lickter turned toward Daisy, “smart thinking, honey. Now get inside.”

“Daddy.”

Lickter ran his thumb across his throat and shoved her into the room. He nodded at Starr. “Get ready to say something heroic.” After fiddling with a couple of knobs, he threw a switch.

“Huh?” Starr started as his voice echoed from the grate on the box, magnified threefold. A high-pitched squeal rattled his teeth.

Lickter spun a dial all the way down before slowly climbing it back up. “Sorry about that. Technology.” He shrugged. But the terrible noise had served a purpose. Starr looked out over the chaos below where hundreds of eyes teetering between anger and despair were riveted on him. Temporarily their discontent had been given a fragile focus by the curiosity of a single man amidst a mob standing on a balcony with a contraption in his hand.

 
Feeling the crowd’s piercing gaze, he knew he had only fractions of a second to become the champion these disenfranchised, embarrassed, ashamed, infuriated and emasculated men needed to give them purpose again. But even as he opened his lips to speak, he feared the sting of piercing, hot lead if he failed.

“Citizens of the great state of Texas!” His voice boomed from the box behind him, echoing off the Scarborough Building across Congress Avenue. They needed someone to give their pleas a voice. That someone couldn’t be Oleg. “Many of you know me as Jim Starr, bronc rider. Some of you know me as Senator Starr, District 14.” A few jeers rose at the mention of his office. “I know myself, first and foremost, as the proud son of tenant farmers from Bastrop. If my father were a younger man, he’d be among you today, I’ve no doubt.”

Starr locked eyes with Rodchenko, still surrounded by an entourage of angry youth. He used them like he’d used Starr that morning. Worse yet, Oleg Rodchenko was wrong. Government could help the people, if they gave it a chance. No institution could give a man his dignity back, but neither would further violence. Starr gained strength from the grey-haired professor’s smug expression.

“I don’t know much.” He spoke confidently into the microphone. “But one thing I know for damn sure, is that you and I understand the importance of a hearty breakfast. We know the value of honest work. The importance of holding your head high after a day, after weeks, after years of honest labor, blood and sweat under the sun.”

He took a deep breath, filled with childhood griefs of his own. “I know that you’ve come here today thinking greedy and lazy men have taken all that from you, stolen your dignity and honor.” An angry shout pierced the stillness in the street. “Well you’re wrong.” Starr swallowed. “No one can take a man’s character against his will. You’ve built it through a lifetime of good, honest actions, and you own it. The man in the big house—” hisses rippled across the mob.

Starr trembled before redoubling his resolve. “The man in the big house takes the fruit of your labor. He takes your land one harvest at a time.” He choked and rubbed the scar on his cheek with the palm of his hand. “He embarrasses you in front of your children by providing the very things he’s prohibited you from providing. He laughs at the pitiful wooden horse you carved over a month’s worth of late nights as a gift for your oldest boy. He shames your child into rejecting the gift by giving his own son a pony, a saddle, a stable.”

He swallowed, letting the emotion of his own experiences well up in his chest and lump in his throat. “And that’s when it strikes you. You thought only you were ashamed of what you’d become.” Utter silence fell across the financial district, the stillness broken only by the grey bellies of rain clouds drifting overhead.

“God knows, the man in the big house has taken more than his due, and the devil’s yet to take his. But no one takes a man’s good name. You can still leave here with your heads held high. Character, dignity and honor. Don’t throw all that away in an hour of lawlessness.”

He scanned the crowd. Guns lowered. Stones dropped back to the pavement. Only the clump of students still bristled, but they lacked the inner fuel that years of oppression baked into lumps of angry coal. The tide had turned, but the fuse continued to burn. “Truth and dignity are on your side, even if the law isn’t. And God knows you’ve got every right to be angry. It’s a fact that God expects us to be angry at injustice. He commands it.”

Starr shook his head theatrically. “But not like this. These shops you’re destroying. Sure they belong to wealthy men, greedy men even, like the kind that takes the food from your tables.” He took a therapeutic breath, realizing he’d never shared the pain of his fifth birthday, nor the pain he’d seen in his father’s eyes when he’d rejected the gift born of his father’s love. Instead he’d born his own private shame from then till now.

Letting the guilt wash over him and lift for the first time in thirty years created a weightlessness. Teetering on the edge of the balcony he continued, “But you’re only hurting men like yourselves—men who lease the storefronts, and hand over their profits in exchange for the right to work for a living. When hail ruins your crop, who pays for it the next winter? The man in the big house? Or you and your kids?”

A shout ripped through the crowd, “We do!”

“That’s right. And when you smash these windows, who pays for the repairs? The man in the top of the tower? Or the small businessman and his kids?”

A single horse’s hoof scuffing the pavement echoed across the stillness until a single small voice picked up the refrain, “We do.”

Starr nodded slowly. “That’s right. You’ve made your voice heard. I’ve heard it. Governor Hobby—” hisses from the students. “Governor Hobby will have to call a special session. You’ve accomplished that. Now let me take it from here. Together, we’ll fix this. We’ll get the truth and the law back on the same side, your side. I promise it.”