The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (28 page)

The brothers traded shifts through the night and reached Sedalia, Missouri, the
morning after talking to Brickbat’s mother. Lies to a kind and trusting
man at the post office won them the former address of the incarcerated Sanders
brother. It was a large two-story house, set a good hundred yards from the
road. A semicircular gravel driveway extended like a frown to its front porch.
The front lawn was untended, the farmland yellow and desiccated. No cars were
visible, but the barn doors were closed and the gravel in the drive appeared to
be furrowed by recent passage.
Whit was at the wheel of their most recently stolen vehicle, a black Terraplane
not unlike the one they’d driven before their first death. After crossing
the Missouri border the previous night, they’d traded cars on the off
chance the old bat had called the cops and recorded their tag numbers.
Whit drove by the farmhouse as slowly as he could without seeming suspicious.
Jason scanned the empty acreage behind the buildings, half a mile of fallow
farmland before some woods cropped up in the distance.
“Curtains are drawn on a hot day,” he noted. “And the windows
are open.”
The country road was a long spoke off the local thruway that led to a distant
hamlet and the few farms between. After driving on for two minutes, Whit turned
around and made a second pass. This time Jason saw a lone figure standing
behind the house, with his back to it, and close enough to the building that he
was shielded from the road—unless a passerby was very persistently
studying the area. The figure, standing in a bored smoker’s pose, wore
dark pants and an undershirt crisscrossed with the leather slashes of what
appeared to be a shoulder holster.
The brothers drove past the next town and stopped for lunch ten miles later at
the one after that. They had hours before nightfall to form a plan, as if all
that time would allow them to come up with any better options than the very
simple one they were already considering.

XX.

I
t was hot that night and the mosquitoes
were ravenous. The droning of crickets was occasionally interrupted by what
might have been coyotes or lost dogs crying for their masters.
The grass was too dry for Jason and Whit to walk silently, but they did the
best they could. They were in a small grove of elms that extended a few hundred
yards, ending at what was likely the Sanders property line. They stood there
and saw the building’s faint outline in the escaping twilight, as well as
a few hints of illumination from where drawn curtains didn’t quite meet.
There was a light breeze and they smelled tobacco and a coal stove.
They waited among the trees, sometimes hearing raised voices, though none
female. Supposedly a woman and her daughter lived here, but there were no
sounds of children, nor any of their playthings in the front yard. Jason
wondered if Brickbat’s sister-in-law and niece had already fled the
place, or if the thugs had shooed them away or worse.
The brothers decided it would be best to corner one of the kidnappers coming or
going rather than storming the building when at full capacity. It would need to
happen far enough away so as not to be overheard at the house. They turned and
walked back to the Terraplane, which they had parked unseen from the road.
They armored themselves with bulletproof vests once again, though
not without a sense of foreboding irony. Each had an
automatic pistol in a shoulder holster; each held a Thompson across his chest with
two hands. Their pockets were stuffed with extra clips for the pistols, but
they would have to be sparing with the submachine guns. They had hidden the
briefcase of cash under the driver’s seat.
They took turns on watch, one resting at the base of the tree while the other
stood to guard against sleep. The sky was starless and Jason didn’t have
enough light to check the pocket watch he’d forgotten to return to
Marriner. He could have used a smoke but he didn’t want to risk being
spotted.
Jason figured it was past midnight when he heard the car suddenly near them. He
was startled—he hadn’t heard the driver’s doors shut,
hadn’t heard or seen the car approaching. One moment the world was empty
but for the two of them, and suddenly headlights were hurtling toward them.
Jason kicked Whit awake and rushed into the road, aiming his Thompson an inch
above the headlights. After so much silence, it was hard to tell if the
car’s braking sounded loud only to him or if someone in the house might
have been able to hear it, too.
The car, a Chrysler coupe, had barely stopped when a bleary-eyed Whit stepped
forward, aiming his Thompson at the open passenger window. Two men sat in
front. Jason told them to kill the lights, put the car in park, and step out
without shutting the doors.
The men wore work clothes, denim pants and gray cotton shirts unbuttoned at the
collars. Either they had little money or they were trying to disguise
themselves as working stiffs as they drove into Chicago to post their latest
instructions to Jasper Windham. One of them looked like a Norwegian just off
the boat, blond hair and angular jawbones and ropy limbs. The other was heavier
and had a face that reminded Jason that men are descended from apes.
Jason frisked them. Each carried a gat in his pants pocket, one a Luger and the
other a revolver. Jason checked that they were loaded, added them to his own
arsenal, then opened the glove box and made sure there were no hidden
compartments beneath the floorboards. There were, but all he found was a stack
of license plates. In the trunk was a sack of clothing.
“How many more men in the house?”
“Five,” the primate said.
Then the blond rushed in with, “She ain’t in there anymore—we
let her go.”
“Sure you did. I’ll bet you’re driving to the papers now to
tell them the good news.”
“I swear, she’s just—”
Jason flipped the Thompson in his hands and smashed at the man’s mouth
with the handle. The guy crumpled. After a few seconds he sat up, leaning
against the car and collecting teeth with his hands. Jason knelt down and
pressed the Thompson’s butt against the man’s chest.
“The only reason I’m not pumping you now is because your buddies
would hear the shots. Open your mouth again and I might as well do it
anyway.”
Then Jason stood, telling them to do the same. Whit got into the coupe, softly
shutting its doors, and guided it into the woods where they’d stashed
their other stolen car. Jason marched the captive kidnappers alongside the
coupe, and when Whit shut off the engine he had one man lie down on the front
seat and the other in back. Jason found some socks in the trunk and stuffed
them into the men’s mouths. With rope he’d bought that day, he tied
makeshift gags and hog-tied the men’s feet to their wrists.
Before gagging the primate, Jason asked, “Anybody keeping watch at
night?”
“Not tonight.”
“Guys sleep upstairs or down?”
“Three in the bedrooms upstairs, two more in the parlor.”
“You keep Darcy on the second floor?”
The man seemed to consider this. “Yeah. Back bedroom, top of the
stairs.”
The guy in the backseat moaned something.
“I bet your boys have a lot of guns in there.”
“They do.”
“Bet they’ll be awful ticked at you if we shoot some of ’em
up. If me and my brother don’t live to see morning, they’ll come
out here and plug you for messing their works.”
The guy didn’t say anything. Jason fastened the gag.
“So you’d better hope we come out of this
alive and in no mood for more shooting. Then you might live to see
prison.”
The brothers rolled the windows up, then closed the doors. Jason handed Whit
the Luger he’d procured from their captives, keeping the revolver in his
pocket. A rift in the clouds like a celestial quake revealed a thin line of
stars, that tiny amount of light helpful as the brothers crossed through the
woods.
“So,” Whit said in a whisper, “the worst that can happen to
us is what’s already happened, right?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“And we walked away from that just fine. Twice. So, really, there’s
nothing to worry about, huh?”
“Are you trying to talk yourself into this, or out of it?”
But even Jason was sweating beneath his heavy vest. He hadn’t been
nervous before an endeavor in quite some time, but this was something
different. They should have made Marriner come with them, or Owney. They were
two against five, if the ape was telling the truth. Apart from this strange
magic they seemed to be carrying inside them, their only allies would be the
element of surprise and their adversaries’ midnight grogginess. Jason was
accustomed to being on the side of superior man- and firepower, and even then
he’d raided only banks whose floor plans he had memorized. He knew that
he had killed people, but he preferred to think of those events as accidents,
or as awful decisions that were necessary for his survival. Tonight, however,
they would need to be quick and shoot anything that moved. Unless it was Darcy.
Hopefully she was alone in her room. Hopefully the kidnappers would be too busy
scrambling to think of using her as a human shield or a bargaining chip.
Hopefully this wasn’t a very bad idea.
They emerged from the trees and the farmhouse was before them, no lights in the
windows, no sound but the crickets.
Jason stepped onto the old wooden porch first, trying to will his body into
lightness. He hadn’t yet put his hand on the screen door when whichever
plank Whit was standing on groaned. Jason pulled at the screen door’s
handle, held the screen open with his back, then tried the knob of the wooden
door. Unlocked. Thank you, boys.
It was the kind of door that liked to announce it was being opened.
Jason tried it slowly, but that only made it worse, so
he swung it the rest of the way. His night vision was sharp enough now to tell
him this was the kitchen. It smelled like things unwashed. That probably
confirmed Darcy as the only woman in the place. Jason could hear snoring from
close by.
Floorboards groaned again, but this wasn’t Whit. Someone was moving
upstairs. Ahead of Jason and to his left, a sliver of light fell from above,
down a stairway. Forms slowly took shape.
“What the hell!” A man upstairs, screaming. “What the
hell!”
A man who sounded like Brickbat Sanders.
Then rustling from the shadows and the room exploded with light from a lamp.
The guy who’d pulled the cord was sprawled on a couch six feet in front
of Jason. Without thinking, Jason offered an explosion of sound to match the
light.
The figure danced and threw violent new colors on the dull palette before him,
and then the lamp shattered. Now the only light was that coming from
Jason’s barrel, and he spied more motion to the left. Before he could
turn that way, Whit fired, too.
More light fell down the stairway. Feet were pounding upstairs.
Jason remembered how few Thompson rounds he had and stopped firing at the man
on the couch. Stuffing was floating in the air like clouds.
Whit fired another burst at the corner around which a second man had
disappeared. Plaster spat onto the floor.
Two flashes of light sneaked around that wall. Jason didn’t hear the
pistol shots until he felt them. Invisible nails hammered his back to the wall
behind him.
Whit fired again and the kidnapper’s hand and pistol disappeared.
Jason stayed nailed to the wall for an extra second, then slid down. His
collapsed lungs tried to expand and he doubled over in a coughing fit. It felt
as if the nails were still inside him, but he told himself they couldn’t
be. The day someone invented a bulletproof vest that didn’t still hurt
like hell when you took rounds in the chest would be a very good day indeed. He
forced himself to sit up and made sure the Thompson was still in his hands.
A squat body and a submachine gun appeared at the top of the stairs. Jason
remembered how to move just in time. Wood slivers dug into his hair as he fell
forward and rolled out of the shooter’s range.
Whit hurried to the corner that the other downstairs
sleeper had raced behind. His Thompson had nearly torn all the plaster from the
wall, revealing the ancient wood studs and the metal piping. Blood on the far
wall told him his bullets had worked through the corner and found their target.
He heard panting and fired through the corner wall again. The body that had
been hiding there lost its fight with gravity. It fell facefirst, long limbs
and jet-black hair that Whit figured for Elton Roberts. One of his hands held
an automatic pistol, but Whit didn’t have any extra pockets so he let the
corpse keep it.
Whit’s ears were ringing and cordite burned his nostrils. The shattered
walls seemed to be releasing the scent of the building’s past
inhabitants, generations of roasts and firewood and hard labor escaping into
the humid air. Around the corner was a large dining room, but it was empty of
anything but a collapsible table, three chairs, and some playing cards.
In the living room, Jason stood up and trained his weapon at the topmost stair,
where the other shooter had been. He sprayed a few rounds to keep the guy off
guard. Where the hell was Whit? He heard a cry of pain and the staircase
shooter’s feet appeared again. One of them wasn’t really a foot
anymore but a pulpy mess. Jason fired at it and the screams weren’t loud
enough to be heard above the bucking Thompson. The rest of the man’s body
slipped down the stairs, presenting larger targets. It finally landed in a heap
at the bottom of the stairs, a dead man who had liked to sleep in the nude.
Was that two, or three? Motion again and Jason swung around, nearly pulling the
trigger on his brother. They stared at each other, both of them lowering their
weapons, and stepped closer. They listened. Floorboards creaked upstairs. Whit
pointed his Thompson at the ceiling. A very old ceiling. Cracks of light
appearing through weak spots in the wood. Jason read his mind and grabbed
Whit’s barrel and pulled it down, scalding his hand.
Whit looked at him as if he was crazy.
“You might hit her, too,” Jason whispered. Then he shouted into the
silence: “Darcy!”
Nothing in return. Not her voice or anyone else’s.
Then came shots from the kitchen, an automatic pistol. The brothers ducked.
Jesus, maybe there was a second stairwell leading down to the kitchen. They
hadn’t thought to look for one. From behind a couch Whit
poked his Thompson’s barrel and fired toward the
kitchen until the massive gun clicked. After that instant of silence, the
kitchen shooter filled it again. Cushions exploded and Whit flattened himself
to the floor.
Jason pressed himself against the wall and silently inched toward the entrance
to the kitchen. Then he stepped away and was about to fire when the hand of
something very large slapped his back and slammed his chest to the floor. Glass
shattering all around him, cutting his neck and ears. After an instant of
numbness, his back throbbed.
No
.
Someone had leaped outside and gotten him through the windows. With a Thompson.
The rounds had pierced his vest and burrowed into his flesh. But how deeply? He
tried to inhale. He coughed. He rolled to his side. From across the room, Whit
was staring at him with wide eyes. Jason coughed and something came out. A
different window exploded this time and Whit blindly returned fire with his
requisitioned Luger.
No shots for a moment, nothing but ringing ears and the occasional whisper of
glass shavings falling from the jamb. Jason couldn’t move his right arm.
With his left he rolled himself onto his back. It felt as if he’d been
impaled; it was as though parts of his insides were fixed in place and
wouldn’t budge even if the rest of him did. When he tried to move, they
sent enraged messages that his brain could only begin to comprehend. Just
concentrate on breathing, he thought. He could breathe, but not deeply.
“Jason,”
Whit whispered. Jason thought about answering but
decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He sucked his neck into his body so
he could stare at the windows through which he’d been shot.
Jason reminded himself that this didn’t matter. He would walk away from
this. He would be whole tomorrow. He repeated this in his mind, an endless
mantra, while his body, unconvinced, did what it could to get the hell out of
there.