Infamous (29 page)

Could you get that from planting a turnip? Were you any less a man on the other side of a banker’s pen?

Harvey smoked two cigarettes. He wished for a drink, but he drifted off for a few hours without it. At first he thought it was the morning light that had woken him, but, as he turned on one elbow, he heard the automobiles from way off, knowing this was a one-way road to the Shannon place. He reached for the .38 under his pillow, hoping to see a sixteen-cylinder midnight blue Cadillac, as he stood and almost sleepwalked in the early sunlight across stones and pebbles, watching three long black cars appear and, far off, men crawling from vehicles, men in cowboy hats with guns. And the sight of them startled him, sent him scrambling back and jumping onto the porch, pain shooting from his heel up through his calf, as he woke Verne Miller, who clutched his Thompson on the old couch like a spent lover, and told him to get his crazy ass up because the G had arrived and was about to come a-calling.

Miller calmly got up and tucked his pant legs into his boots. He sat on the couch, checking the weapon’s load, and placed a fresh cigarette in the corner of his mouth. With those cool blue eyes trained on Harvey Bailey, he said: “Wake the old man and woman. Go fetch Wilbur and Jim and Potatoes. And let the dogs out. Give those G-men a nice welcome.”

THEY WEREN’T LIKE ANY BULLDOGS JONES HAD EVER SEEN, brown mongrels with jaw muscles as tight as walnuts, bounding—almost flying—in solid muscular leaps across the dusty ground and launching themselves at Bruce Colvin. He turned his back, careful not to fire and wake the house, but the dog caught a solid bit of his arm and chewed and tore, not letting go. Colvin spun wild and tried to knock the hound away.

Doc White leveled a bowie knife into the mongrel’s back, and it yipped and fell away, skittering far off, yelping and spinning crooked, as if chasing its tail, away and wide in endless loops into the dead cornfield.

The other dog followed and grabbed hold of Gus Jones’s boot, ripping and thrashing. But Jones didn’t feel a thing through the thick leather as he kicked the damn beast ten feet, the animal giving a good cry before darting after the other.

Colvin ripped the material of his suit coat and bound the bloody upper arm, pulling a loose tooth from his torn flesh and gritting his own teeth, trying like hell not to flinch in front of the older men.

“Thanks,” Colvin said.

White wiped the blade on his pant leg and slid it into the scabbard.

“Right outta hell,” Doc said.

CHARLIE FOLLOWED THE MEN, WHO WERE SPREADING OUT FROM the gravel road with weapons hanging from their hands, up and over a small hill, and approaching the farmhouse from the front. There were fourteen in all, including himself, and six of them took a wide loop around the house to cover the back of the property near the barn. Guineas scattered high up and into an old oak and stared down with their small eyes, calling out in a high yell that sounded like a woman’s screams. The old agent, Jones, hadn’t said any more to him, even as Charlie’d crawled out of the automobile with a Browning he’d only fired once and tagged along with the agents in the high, dead grass. The old man using hand signals to send men around to side windows as he mounted the steps at first light and knocked on the door with all the confidence of a Fuller Brush salesman.

He pulled back the screen door, Charlie glancing off at a sprinting rooster, before hearing the six rifle shots from a side window, sending the old man diving from the stairs and scrambling into a gully, where five of them had found lousy cover to return fire, until the whole house was pocked with bullet holes.

“I guess they’re awake,” Jones said. “Kinda hopin’ I could wake ’em gentle.”

The old man took refuge next to Charlie and aimed his machine gun at the door, sighting for any movement in the windows. Three more rifle reports—
BLAM, BLAM, BLAM
—from a window. The men ducked, and Jones returned with a long rat-a-tat-tat from the Thompson, elegantly raking the house siding. He reached into his coat pocket for another loaded round and snicked it into the frame. The windows had all been busted out, the doorframe hung loose and crooked from a single hinge.

The guineas and chickens grew quiet. That lone black rooster sprinted back and forth across the fine dirt, too foolish to find cover.

And then there was a hard blast from the rifle and half a dozen shots from a cracking pistol. Charlie could just make out the shape of the man from the broken window, as he’d up and disappear, up and disappear, like a metal silhouette from a Midway gallery.

Charlie took careful aim, waiting for the son of a bitch to pop his head up just one more time. But as he sighted down the barrel he felt the weight of a hand pressing the gun down, and he turned to see Gus Jones, hard light refracting off his glasses, making him appear goddamn blind, or egg-eyed like Little Orphan Annie.

“They’re coming out,” Jones said. “Hold it.”

Charlie didn’t see a thing. In the silence, a hawk circled the Shannon property, taking in all the foolishness from a great height. For some reason, Charlie wanted to blow that son of a bitch out of the sky, too.

HARVEY KICKED WILBUR UNDERHILL OUT OF BED WITH THE heel of his shoe, tossed him his pants and machine gun, and told him to load up. Jim Clark was already on Armon’s porch, grabbing ammunition for two .45 automatics and packing as many bullets as he could hold in his pants, slipping into his felt hat, even though he only sported an undershirt, grinning for the gift of a morning gunfight. They’d loaded into Harvey’s Buick, Armon providing useless directions down the one-way road, and nearly made it to old Boss Shannon’s barn before the law opened up on them, three quick bullet holes appearing out of nowhere, random and thorough, through the windshield, cracking it as cold as ice and sending Harvey veering, fishtailing the Buick, but then mashing the goddamn accelerator and heading straight for the mouth of the barn. Chickens fell under tires, feathers flying up into the air, as he braked near the old slatted barn, crisscrossed with shafts of fine light, Underhill and Clark already out of the machine and scampering high up into the hot hayloft to find a good vantage point to do some shooting.

Harvey made his way into a stall with a half door and saw three men in cowboy hats, holding rifles, take aim from atop black sedans.

“Can I get some help?” Harvey yelled up to the loft.

Underhill answered with a violent spew from the Thompson that shook the entire government sedan, flattening tires, busting out windows, and leaving it pockmarked and sagging, the exclamation of a busted radiator spewing steam. In the silence that followed, government men sprinted from behind the automobile and headed for the front of the farmhouse, right before two quick pistol shots from Jim Clark cut down one of them at the knees, and a stream of hard chatter from “Mad Dog” Underhill’s reloaded drum kicked up the dust and grit in a trailing poof right up to the fine shoes of another federal agent, while yet another agent took a flying leap right up and over the chest-high fence of a hogpen.

One of the men looked to be dead.

Another crawled up and under the axles of Boss Shannon’s farm truck.

The shots continued from the front of the old, single-story farmhouse—rifles, Thompsons, and some pistols, in a small, merry band—Harvey knowing Miller could use some help, and maybe, just maybe, they could get off some shots to clear a way out.

Harvey yelled for Underhill to give cover, as he hurried the best he could on that bum leg across the open chicken ground and rapped on the back door, yelling for the Shannons to open the goddamn door. He turned to see goddamn Armon right behind him, calling out for his pa.

Boss opened up, wild-eyed and sweating, crying that Harvey Bailey had brought the law to his homestead, and Harvey told the old man to put a sock in it. It was George and Kathryn that had landed these bastards on his land.

“I ain’t goin’ down without a fight,” Boss said. “You can’t just come on a man’s property and start a-shootin’.”

“Where’s Verne?”

“He got hit.”

Harvey followed a crooked trail of blood on the slatted wooden floor into a bedroom, where Miller sat with his butt against a metal bed, wrapping his shoulder with his shirt and gritting his teeth as he tied it up tight. He still held on to the machine gun, his naked upper body covered in blood and sweat, and when he moved to a busted-out window for a look-see, it was on his tail, slow and deliberate, getting a good view of the G-men, hiding like cowards behind a row of vehicles they’d moved down from the main road.

“You all right?”

“Peachy,” Verne Miller said, a slight tic in his right eye.

“Wilbur cleared out three of them,” Harvey said. “How many out front?”

“Eight. Maybe ten.”

“Peachy.”

“The Buick still out back?” Miller asked.

“Gassed up,” he said. “Keys in it.”

“We can’t make it down the road. It’s cut off.”

“We can make it,” Harvey said.

Miller shook his head. “What about them?”

“Who cares? Long as we get the boys.”

“Young girl’s pregnant.”

“Where is she?”

“Totin’ a pistol. She grabbed it out of my hand.”

“And Ma?”

“She’s shooting, too.”

“Hell of a family,” Harvey Bailey said. “Always wondered where Kathryn got her set of balls.”

22

N
early an hour passed, and no one had fired a shot. Colvin ran down through the gully and found Jones conferring with Doc White and Joe Lackey about setting fire to the barn, while Charlie Urschel eyed down the twin barrels of his shotgun, just waiting for one of those chickens to stick its head out. Jones gave the order to toss some kerosene lanterns into the hayloft and told Colvin to shoot down every last bastard who came running from that barn. They had one man dead, two men in some rough shape, one in a pig trough and another bleeding under a tractor. Jones studied the agent’s face to make sure he understood all this but only saw the neatly parted hair and eager eyes of that young agent from back at Union Station in Kansas City. “Keep your head down. You hear me, son?”

Jones exchanged glances with Lackey.

Colvin nodded, and scurried back down in the gully to the gauntlet of bullet-filled cars blocking the road from around back of the house. Urschel remained, sighting that damn shotgun, arms starting to tremble from fatigue.

There was the sound of glass breaking, and a few minutes later they smelled and saw the smoke drifting, lazy and slow, in the hot, airless day. The gunshots started again, the rat-a-tat-tatting of the Thompson, the rapid fire of automatics. Young men yelled and returned fire. Jones told a couple detectives from Dallas to keep their eyes trained on the front porch and windows, and he ran for the barn with Detective Ed Weatherford in tow.

Bullets zinged past Jones, and he ducked behind the shithouse, the smell something awful, and Weatherford followed, falling down at his boots.

The lanky detective found his feet, brushing off his pants and grinning, having a hell of a time, as he pointed the barrel of his pistol around the old outhouse and squeezed off some shots.

“You see ’em?”

“I hear ’em,” Weatherford said. “You think it’s Kelly?”

“It ain’t Greta Garbo.”

“They got a Thompson.”

“So do I.”

“He ain’t no expert,” Weatherford said. “That’s just a lie.”

“You wanna test that theory?”

Weatherford grinned. “You first.”

HARVEY FRIED SOME EGGS IN A BLACK SKILLET WHILE VERNE Miller counted out the rest of the ammunition on the kitchen table, divvying it all out in old coffee cans. Ma Shannon trained a shotgun out the salon window, already brought to tears over her shot-up china and brand-new RCA, while Potatoes held a .22 rifle, watching the rear of the house and the rolling black smoke coming from their barn. Boss was off somewhere, trading duties of watching the child and taking up the gun. The baby girl had run wild through the house, screaming and crying, while bullets had zipped past her in what a superstitious man might call a miracle. Somewhere in the house, he heard old Boss singing a lullaby.

“Y’all got any bacon?” Harvey asked.

“In the icebox,” Potatoes said.

“I looked in the icebox.”

“I guess I was thinkin’ of my icebox.”

“You think you could run back to the house and fetch me up a pound?”

“No, sir,” Potatoes said. “Not right now. I just seen them two bank examiners run behind the shitter. What in the world are they doin’ here?”

“Armon, were you dropped on your head as a youngster?” Verne Miller asked, five guns ready to go. He placed a .45 in his belt and carried the Thompson to the window beside the boy.

“Now, that’s a hell of a question, Verne,” Harvey said, cracking an egg into the hot skillet. He figured since they were going to be in here a while, there was no sense in starving.

“This is the greatest day of my life, fellas,” Armon said. “I sure am glad my family’s here to see it.”