Guns [John Hardin 01] (5 page)

5

I
RA COHN SAT DOWN NAKED IN A STRAIGHT CHAIR AT THE
doorway of the book-and-file-piled closet he called his home office for IRS purposes and booted up his Micron, which occupied one whole shelf. He logged onto the Internet quickly, thinking
I knew it would come to me.

He ran a search under “the wild west", got a long list of sites, scrolled down a few pages, and clicked on “Outlaws". Bingo. There it was.

Sam Bass.

He picked up a half-eaten Milky Way from the mouse pad, took a bite, and started reading fast, automatically condensing and editing as he went.

Born 21 July, 1851, Indiana. Parents died when he was small. Raised by a skinflint uncle who worked him like a dog and denied him an education. Ran away by building a raft and floating down the Mississippi to Rose-dale. Worked hard as a teamster, driving supplies to Texas. Bought a fast sorrel mare which he raced, winning enough bets to quit his job.

Discovered hard liquor.

Took up with Henry Underwood, who had fought with Jennison’s Jayhawkers against Quantrill’s guerrillas and obviously knew guns. They got into a minor scrape and lit out, chased perfunctorily by the sheriff. Bass became a partner in a freight company and later in a mine, which failed, whereupon he fell in with a pack of serious gunmen. They robbed seven Deadwood stages in the Black Hills in 1876 and ‘77. In the fall of 1877 the gang boarded a train at Big Springs, Nebraska, and relieved it of $60,000 in newly minted twenty-dollar gold pieces, collecting another $1,300 from the startled passengers.

The gang split up but Bass gathered another group of hardcases to establish an enterprise of robbing Texas trains. Among his business associates were old friends Henry Underwood and Frank Jackson, along with apprentice thief Jim Murphy. Subsequent train robberies soon made Sam Bass the most notorious and most wanted outlaw in Texas—dead or alive—but he eluded a small army of lawmen by moving from one hideout to another in the back woods of Denton County.

There was the inevitable shootout, at Salt Creek, and Bass had to escape with others on foot, which only increased the rewards posted for them.

Turned out Jim Murphy was working for the authorities, hoping to get himself and his old man extricated from certain previous charges, and hoping for at least a goodly chunk of the posted rewards. Even some members of the hardened Texas Rangers would later revile Murphy for his betrayal of the Bass gang.

Murphy was present in July of 1878 when the Bass gang met to plan a robbery of the Round Rock, Texas, bank and he got a message out to the Rangers, who were waiting in force when the gang rode into town.

There was a big-time gunfight. A deputy shot Bass through the hand. Then he was trying to calm his skittish horse when a Ranger knelt in an alleyway, took deliberate aim, and shot Sam in the back. Frank Jackson spurred his horse and grabbed the reins of Sam’s mount. They rode hard, Bass hunched over and bleeding but still trying to shove cartridges into his pistol, down an alley, up a rutted street, and on out of town.

Jackson, also wounded, managed to guide his friend’s horse for several miles. Near Bushy Creek, Bass told Jackson to stop. Jackson helped his friend down onto the grass under a tree. Bass told Jackson to leave and take what gold they had between them. Jackson reluctantly obeyed and rode away, vanishing. The Rangers found Bass that night, still alive, and carried him back to Round Rock.

They questioned him at length about his associates but he gave them nothing of value and on 21 July, 1878, at the exact age of twenty-seven, Sam Bass passed into history.

Could be one of two things, Ira thought. Either it’s just a coincidence. Most likely that. Or, for a guy who thinks of himself as a cowboy—Mrs. Stilley had volunteered as much—for a guy who even
looks
like a cowboy, for a guy like that, Ira thought, Sam Bass could be an alias.

This was two days after he had returned to Raleigh from Ocracoke, three days actually, it being two in the morning now. It had been the previous afternoon before he had found time to tap out a draft of the piece about the rescue. He had handed a hard copy to his wrinkled editor along with the stack of contact sheets, asking about the possibility of submitting an expense voucher for the past weekend. The editor had ignored the expense plea, had skimmed the piece, had used her loupe to quickly scan through the photo proofs, circling just four possibles with her fat felt-tip, then had grunted once and nodded, which Ira had taken as high praise. She wanted him to use a digital camera, but he stubbornly preferred to use print film, developing and printing it himself in the newspaper’s darkroom. The piece would run the following Sunday as a half-page spread with a single photo on the front of the
People
section, above the fold.

Ira Cohn was stark naked.

Whereas Samantha Blackstone was stark nude, standing there now in the doorway of his bedroom down his short apartment hallway, hipshot and wearing only an extremely exasperated expression, her arms crossed under those Olympian breasts.

“You tell me I remind you of some Greek sculpture in some old ruin called The Porch Of The Maidens,” she said. “Well, all right. Then you jump up and tell me, hey, hold it.
Wait
a minute. Now you’re playing with your
computer?
You have about
five
more seconds before I hold my nose and go into your filthy kitchen and try to find a
nutcracker.
“ She pointed an elegant finger inside the bedroom and stamped her foot on the carpet. “I suggest that you shut that thing
off
and get your skinny, hairy butt back in here right
now
.”

“Okay, okay,” Ira said, shutting down the Micron.

Within twenty minutes the scene in his cluttered bedroom did indeed resemble certain aspects of the wild west, and he had clean forgotten all about Sam Bass.

6

L
OUIS
S
TRAKE STOOD ON HIS HIGH DECK, HIS GLASS WALL
at his back, looking down at the evening traffic that flowed in perpetual two-way streams along the Tappan Zee Bridge stretched across the darkened Hudson. The house was in deep shadow and the last of the sunset torched the tops of buildings across the river, lights coming on all over. Behind him in the dazzling chandeliered dining alcove off of the huge indirectly-lit great room, Dorothy was preparing the large glass table for him, his wife, and his daughter. He was still wearing his newest double-breasted light gray suit that had been tailored for him in London, and a dark blue silk shirt with matching tie, having returned home just under two hours ago from an art scholarship benefit luncheon that he and his young wife Elaine had hosted at the Strake Gallery of New Age Art in the city. The gallery was Elaine’s private passion, a gift from him, and it had even required a little creative bookkeeping on the part of his accountants to keep its profit minimal this year.

He was fifty-one and an even six feet tall, with a once-muscular build now just beginning to show signs of softening, but he worked hard to keep kept himself toned and trim, and he had his thick silvered mane of hair brushed high and straight back and sprayed in place.

His glass wall was constructed of five massive French doors with a row of fifteen-foot-high Palladium windows above, and the view from up here on the Palisades—the house half-cantilevered from sheer rock two hundred feet above the river—was spectacular. He especially enjoyed it at night, when he could look across toward the glitter of White Plains, and see the awesome sky-glow downriver that was being sprayed up from Manhattan.

Gazing out on all those lights made him feel a part of the sprawling, intricately-tentacled economy that nourished one of the greatest urban concentrations on the planet, and for a time he could almost forget that he often moved in a much darker world.

He also maintained another immaculate house in Vancouver and what he called his getaway cottage in the Bahamas, a neutral place where he often conducted business. His gleaming seventy-two-foot Hatteras was cruising down the Intracoastal under the guidance of his captain and two crew people to Fort Lauderdale. It would stay there for an electronics upgrade before moving to the Bahamas, where it would be constantly ready for him and certain of his associates throughout the winter.

One of the French doors opened behind him. “Excuse me, sir,” Dorothy said quietly, “I believe Mr. Montgomery just drove up.”

“The man’s name is Montgomery Davis. I’ve told you that before, dammit. It’s Mr. Davis. When will dinner be served?”

“Yes, sir. In twenty minutes.”

Strake walked erectly inside, strode across the high-gloss oak floor to the vaulted entrance foyer, and opened one of the heavy stained-glass doors. Davis, looking bear-like in a black windbreaker, was coming up the lit walkway, having parked his maroon Mercedes with its dark-tinted glass.

“You’re late,” Strake told him.

“The traffic was bad.”

“That’s something you allow for. Keep your jacket on. We’ll go out on the deck.”

They crossed through the great room. Strake opened one of the center French doors, and they walked out onto the deck, Strake closing the door behind them. He moved over to put his hands on the rail and look down.

He knows I hate heights
, Davis thought.

Davis was a big man in his late forties with the face of a football coach set off by a razored black goatee. He had seen much violence in his long career and feared few humans or circumstances, but heights made his head light and his breathing rapid and shallow.

“Come here,” Strake said. There was a breeze picking up. There were no poles under the deck, just big struts angled back into the rock. The traffic on the bridge far below moved in beaded strings of light. Red one way, white the other.

Davis walked over to stand near the rail, not touching it. Controlling his breathing.

The deck was softly lit from built-in fixtures under the railing and from the glow of the lights spread out down there. Davis thought he could feel the deck boards shifting slightly under his feet.

Strake reached into the inside pocket of his immaculate suit jacket and took out a newspaper clipping. He held it out to Davis. It was carefully folded to show a photo of a lanky man standing in a side-hug with a short woman. Davis took his time studying it, bending slightly to hold it down under the railing lights, and unfolding it to scan the article. The piece was actually an abbreviated version, though Davis couldn’t know that. Picked up by the Associated Press Syndicate, it had run in one hundred and twelve different papers across the country, mostly as filler on slow news days. Davis straightened and said, “It’s the Cowboy. On some island in North Carolina.”

“Yes. Keep the clipping.”

“Louis, are you sure this will be worth—” But Strake cut him off with a quick stop-it gesture.

“We have the transaction in Miami next week,” Strake said. “That should take no more than three days.”

Tina, Strake’s chubby three-year-old daughter, wobbled across the floor of the great room all by herself in her fluffy pink slippers and Pooh pajamas, clutching a yellow-dressed doll in one arm. She stopped, slapped the window with her free hand, and waved. Slapped and waved. Slapped and waved. Slapped and waved. Leaving finger marks on the glass.

Strake smiled and waved back. Elaine hurried over, not looking out onto the deck, took Tina by the hand, and led her quickly away.

“When we get back from Miami,” Strake said, absently watching his shapely young wife and his daughter through the glass wall, “I want you to go down there and kill him.”

Davis was still for a moment. Then he said, “All right, Louis.”

Strake turned back to rest his hands on the railing and look off. “I’m telling you now so you can think about it. Take Winston and the new one, Donny. The son of a bitch knows you and he may have seen Winston, so Donny will be useful, and the young man has his specialties. The pay will be thirty thousand. Half up front. I don’t care how you split it. You pay your own expenses. Be careful. Set it up. And, Montgomery…”

“Yes.”

Strake turned his head to look intently at him, those black eyes glittering now in the up-light.

Like a pissed-off wharf rat,
Davis thought,
or a rabid Doberman, standing there stock still just before it charges you.
He wondered, not for the first time lately, why he had worked so long for this guy who wanted people to think he was high-class but who was really no better than any number of other men who lived in Davis’s world of shadows and violence. Strake tried to talk like a lawyer but Davis thought he wasn’t fooling anybody. He was like two different men, one this fake slick talker and the other basically just a street thug like himself.

“I want him to see it coming,” Strake said, speaking slowly. “You listen to what I’m telling you. First, I want you to break him. Take your time doing it. I want him to hurt. I want him to see it coming.” “We’ll take care of it, Louis.”

“Now, you’d better be going. I’m sure you have some young lady waiting. You always do. And the traffic is bad.”

7

S
AM BASS WAS IN THE PRIVATEER WAITING FOR VALERIE
to get off work, nursing a draft at the bar and watching a “Gunsmoke” rerun on the muted TV, the jukebox belting out “Wild Thing” at the eardrum-splitter setting. The back bar above the multicolored ranked bottles was decorated with plastic muskets, a draped Jolly Roger, and crossed sheet-metal cutlasses.

He had visited the Stilleys that morning. Adele had driven Ralph back home the day before. The hospital had been holding him to monitor his heart condition. Over Adele’s fresh-ground coffee in their gleaming much-gad-geted contemporary kitchen the three of them had gotten into a discussion about their favorite old dirty jokes, one on Ralph’s top ten list being the quickie about the man who walks into this book store and asks the buxom young lady at the counter, “Excuse me, do you keep stationery?”

“Well, right up until the end,” the young thing replies demurely, “but then I just go all to pieces.”

Sitting there in the chrome-plated kitchen, Sam had suddenly realized that it wasn’t so much the jokes but the way Ralph’s face wrinkled up and he chuckled and wheezed wholeheartedly to himself that set you off. Sam had promised to come back one evening in a week or so with Valerie and Joshua so Adele could serve a royal feast to all of them.

Mrs. Bradley was watching Joshua. Valerie would meet Sam here tonight and they would dance for a while and he would have one or two drafts while Valerie had a vanilla Coke and they would talk with their friends who drifted in. If Ruben Dixon happened by with his Coast Guard comrades Sam planned to coerce them into lightening their wallets considerably buying rounds for the house.

A sunburned muscular man in his thirties with shaggy blond hair and a dimpled grin walked up to stand beside Sam and shouted, “You Sam Bass?”

Sam nodded.

“How about we go in the back, have a little talk.”

Sam shrugged, got off the stool, carrying his draft, and followed the man into the pool room where there were somewhat fewer decibels in violent collision. They took a corner booth. The room was decorated with more mementos of that era when the difference between a pirate and a privateer had been only a matter of one’s political alliance. In other words, Sam often thought, things haven’t changed all that much since then.
Same old thing; different century.

There were framed plaques on the walls summarizing the exploits of buccaneers Stede Bonnet, Henry Morgan, Jean Laffite, and Calico Jack Rackham, and of buccaneer-persons Anne Bonny and Grace O’Mally. In a central place of honor on the back wall in a large ornate frame there was somebody’s acrylic rendition of the infamous Blackbeard, dressed all in black, his fists resting on his hips and his booted feet set wide, wearing a ferocious expression, his pigtailed beard wild, smoldering hemp fuses sticking out from under the brim of his tri-corn hat, a brace of black powder pistols behind his wide belt.

Blackbeard—Edward Teach to his mother and his business associates—had owned a big house on Ocracoke, often called at the time Blackbeard’s Castle, and another house up the Pamlico River in Bath, where he entertained neighboring planters and certain politicians lavishly and kept one or two of his fourteen wives. The hefty Teach had finally been wounded twenty-five times and then beheaded in a savage fight just off Ocracoke in November of 1718 by a crew sent on the mission by an angry Virginia governor, North Carolina’s Governor Charles Eden by all accounts having been a well-paid friend to the pirate.

One legend had it that on certain dark nights you still might catch a glimpse of Blackbeard’s eerily glowing body swimming in the sea near the island in search of its head, and indeed, on murky nights when phosphorescence made the breakers burn green and the wet beach sand lit up magically if you ran on it—a glowing disc at each footfall—the legend was a bit harder to disbelieve.

There were lingering rumors of buried treasure hereabout or thereabout along the Carolinas coast and as far north as Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, certainly not disclaimed by regional tourism interests. A research company had recently discovered what were most probably the remains of Teach’s biggest vessel, the forty-cannon
Queen Anne’s Revenge,
in shallow water just down the coast near Cape Lookout, where it had rested for going on three centuries, and there was already a popular exhibit of rusty barnacled shot, a blunderbuss, and other artifacts set up in a Beaufort museum.

There was a small sign nailed to the booth wall that said:

H
AVE
Y
E
F
LOGGED
Y
ER
C
REW
Y
ET
T
ODAY?

“Bo Brinson,” the man said, extending a large callused hand across the much-pocket-knifed booth table.

Sam shook it and said, “You need a pilot?”

“Why I’m here. I’m only a plain fisherman. Tryin’ to make a livin’. Like my daddy and his daddy. From over to Pantego. You want another beer?”

He signaled the waitress, an attractive young brunette dressed like a wench in a full burgundy skirt and white peasant blouse, and she blushed coyly when Bo turned the full force of his white-toothed dimpled grin on her. “Lord, but you’re a pretty thing,” he said. “Would you please bring this gentleman here and me two drafts? I’d be obliged if you’d put that on a tab for me.”

When the waitress was out of earshot, Bo grinned at Sam and said, “You ever done any fish spotting?”

“No. But I suppose there’s always a first time.”

“That’s the attitude. Me and Spud, my partner, ran my boat over from the mainland this afternoon. She’s a twenty-three-foot skimmer. Beamy, with a flat bottom and square bows, a tower in the center, and a jet drive. Built for the shallows and to run out a corral net in a jiffy. She’s tied up at the public dock and we got us a room at the Pony Island. We’ll be goin’ out before daybreak. We’re after sea mullet. Fish about three foot long. Speedy. You find them in schools anywheres from a dozen to a whole bunch. It’s the time for ‘em. Over in Japan they like their caviar, you know? Well, sturgeon’s harder to net every year all around the world and I guess mullet roe don’t taste half bad if you go ahead and call it caviar, so the price of sea mullet’s gone up ten times what it was. There’s some good money to be made. Thing is, now everybody and his white-haired grandmother is after ‘em. Fisheries got so they can’t sleep at night worryin’ we’ll net every last one of them poor sea mullet in just a week or two. So now they say you can’t spot ‘em from a plane. You with me so far?”

“I think so.”

The waitress came over with the drafts. It seemed as though the top of her peasant blouse had slipped a bit since her last visit. She took enough time wiping off the already clean booth table so that Bo, and incidentally Sam, absolutely could not fail to notice she was most generously endowed and unfettered by a bra.

After she left, Bo said, “See, I figure what Fisheries don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. Say you was to spot for us, Sam. We’d use a radio—I expect you got a spare hand-held for us or you can borrow one—but we never say fish or hey, there they are or like that. We use a code. We meet someplace tomorrow morning off behind the island here and you fly around, take a good look. Right now you’ll find ‘em in around the marshes on the sound sides of the Banks, sometimes in no more’n two foot of water. No problem for us. We can get ‘em if they’re swimming in dewey grass. Easy to see from up there. Not near so easy from down here. Okay, you spot a school you say on the radio, ‘I think I’ll take a aerial picture of this interestin’ feature here.’ Or whatever. And you circle. We blast over there and you fly right over that school and wag your wings.” He illustrated by wiggling a meaty hand in the air above the salt shaker. “We get close enough to see ‘em from my tower and then circle ‘em with the net. You go off and gas up or whatever. Drink a beer. Give us no more’n thirty minutes to get ‘em in the boat, ice ‘em down in boxes, and re-rig the gear. Then we do her all over again. We get all our boxes full to the top, we hightail it for the fish house over to Hobucken. We meet right here tomorrow night and you get paid cash money. I’d say a fair share of the take, but you got no way to know how much that will be, so let’s just say a straight fifty an hour, from the time you crank her up until you shut her down.”

“Even if you don’t catch anything?”

Bo turned up the wattage on his dimpled grin. “Now, there’s about no chance of that at all, with you spotting and us netting. I’m flat the best there is around here. You just ask my old gray-haired momma. I figure we could use you regular for the next two weeks. Maybe longer. We all make us some money. What do you think?”

Sam’s kitty was getting skinny. The Cessna was coming up for its annual inspection in a month, and needed new tires. His rent would soon be due and he was running up a fuel tab at the village station. With fall coming on there were fewer tourists on the island so his sightseeing business had dropped to almost nothing. The motels were filling up with anglers drawn by the excellent seasonal surf fishing, but they seldom booked a charter other than an occasional emergency sortie to bring in a load of fresh bait. He’d been working on the new rental cottage for Brad Meekins but had been waiting for two days now for Brad to take his pickup over to the mainland on the ferry and bring back sheet rock, paint, wallpaper, and moldings that were needed.

“I think you could talk the varnish right off of this table,” Sam said. “The best thing would be for me to give you GPS coordinates, but that’s out because any bureaucrats listening would be able to home in on the spot, and so would any of your competitors who figure out what’s going on. There’s a way it could work fairly well, though. You could get one of those day-glow-orange ball caps. They’ve got some over at the General Store. I’ve got a cheap old square radio at home that has four bands on it, including the aviation band. You can’t transmit but you won’t have to. I’ll give you a frequency to monitor. That way, if anybody asks you can just say you’ve been listening to George Strait on the FM band; nobody can say you’ve been in touch with an airplane. We meet at some location like you said. I fly over you and say something. If you hear me you put on the cap. Also, when you’re wearing the cap it means you haven’t seen, or heard about, over your marine radio, any kind of law boat nearby. I may have trouble sorting out one kind of small boat from another up there. I’ll go look for the fish. If I seem to be moving too far away you start up and follow along. If I spot a school I won’t circle. I’ll climb up where I can see both you and the spot where the school is. Then I’ll say ‘downwind for one-nine’ or some other number. That means you steer a compass heading of one-ninety. When you get within a hundred feet or so of the school I’ll say ‘final for one-nine.’ These are common phrases that could be coming from anywhere in the eastern part of the state. Except I won’t be giving my aircraft number, of course. I want to sound like some farmer who’s lazy about his radio procedures, maybe flying near some dirt strip. You take your hat off when you want to quit for the day. If I disappear it will probably be just to get fuel at Manteo or somewhere. Stay where you are until I come back. If I don’t show in, say, an hour and a half you know you’re on your own. Tomorrow night you come here, but I won’t be around. Talk to Tony, the bartender. He’ll tell you my hours flown and you pay him. He’ll get some money for his trouble. You give me a number where I can reach you or get a message to you if you’re not still at the Pony Island.”

“You came up with all that just now? Sam, I like the way you think. What we could do is we get one of those hats for Spud, too. That way if we both got ‘em on it means one thing. If just one of us’s got it on it means something else. If the one who’s got the cap on is standing in the bow it means something else, you see? If he’s in the stern—”

“Let’s keep it simple, Bo.”

“Maybe you’re right. So. We got us a deal?”

“We’ll give it a shot. One thing, though. Since this is illegal, I couldn’t shut my conscience up for anything less than seventy-five an hour.”

“You sure you ain’t a lawyer, Sam? You’re a bandit. But, okay. Far as what’s illegal it’s all how you look at it, ain’t it? Over in the South China Sea they go fishin’ with bombs they make from fertilizer and fuel oil, or they use cyanide. Kill
every
damn thing in a couple acres of water, including the coral. Go around after and pick up what they want and leave the rest. All we’re trying to do here is put a little food on my gray-haired momma’s table and maybe pay some on her QVC bill.”

“Sure.”

“Look, Sam, how many people you know always drive the speed limit? Nobody, right? They sell a lot of radar detectors. Come April fifteenth after supper how many people shave a little on their taxes? Everybody, right? Tell Uncle Sam they been givin’ fifty a week to their favorite church. They got to go look one up in the phone book. That trip to Busch Gardens or Mickeyworld with the kids and the mother-in-law was really a job interview. Waitresses only make about seven bucks a month on tips. Everybody’s got a real short memory about any cash they take in, don’t you? Hell, I do. The smart ones, they get some bookkeeper with a real good pencil sharpener knows all the rich man’s tricks, and he helps ‘em shave even more. Then the bookkeeper lays a big flat fee on ‘em but his secretary really only spent two hours ticklin’ her computer mouse to work it all out. The secretary herself’s doing a little thing with the petty cash the bookkeeper don’t know about. You give the lawyers and the doctors and the politicians and the inboard motor mechanics half a chance, what are they gonna do? Carve just as big a slice out of you as they can make off with, is what. Here’s another one.

“How many people you believe have cheated, or thought about cheating, on the little lady, or on the hard-workin’ hubby? Everybody, right? It ain’t been that long ago the
President’s
getting laid in the War Room, sayin’ hey, no, baby, don’t touch them
red
buttons over there and the next thing you know there’s a half-dozen cruise missiles headed for some empty mountain in Afghanistan. President says later hey, honest to gosh, I wouldn’t think of even trying to
spell
Lewbowski, much less prod one.