The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (30 page)

They had come so close to escaping from this life, she and Jason. Surely every
thief or shyster or flimflam man entertained notions of escape or retirement or
living the good life. Such ideas were likely half-baked and ridiculous, but
surely Jason was different. She’d always figured he had some master plan.
He had hid in Darcy’s apartment for two weeks back in April, staying
inside all day and most nights. They passed hours reading the papers as they
lay in bed. They read about Dillinger’s and Baby Face Nelson’s
miraculous escape from a surrounded lodge up in Wisconsin, Clyde Barrow being
riddled by bullets from a former Texas Ranger in Louisiana, and of course the
miscellaneous villainy attributed to Jason and Whit. As a result of all the
attention, the gang had temporarily split up, Jason told her, and he was
weighing his options.
“Maybe it’s time to stop,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“This, everything. The banks and the accomplices and the
endeavors.”
“Stop us, too?”
She jolted as if slapped. “Darling, no. Everything but
that.”
She slid an arm through his, put her hand on his waist. “The point of
stopping all the rest is so we can hold on to each other.”
“What would you do?” he asked her.
“What do you mean, what would I do? I would be with you.”
“Just like that? You’re used to a certain lifestyle, Darcy, and
if—”
“I’ve told you I don’t care about money. I
left
money,
and happily so. Why do you have so much trouble understanding that?”
“Okay. But you’ve always seen me as the guy calling the shots. If I
were to leave the one thing I know, it’d be different.”
“Jason, it was never your being a thief or ringleader that won me.”
“But imagine me digging ditches or turning screws. Would you still see
this great unnameable
something
in me if I was following someone
else’s orders, coming home angry every night?”
“Yes. You’d be a good deal sweatier, of
course, but yes. Emphatically yes.”
She kissed him. It was a good kiss. It meant what it said. Why didn’t he
seem to believe her?
Then she tilted her eyes at him and pinched his side. “So, Mr. Fireson,
what would
you
do if you settled down? Do you have a plan?”
“Move to California, open a restaurant. Plant a vineyard. Watch the
sunset.”
“It would be
wonderful
to be a restaurant owner’s
wife.” She hugged him tighter. “I would greet the guests at the
door, and pour the wine…. But who would cook?”
“I’d hire someone eventually, but at first it’d be me.”
She was unable to suppress a laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing, I’m just … surprised.”
“Does it seem too …
common
a career option after robbing
banks?”
“I’ve never said I’m against being common.”
“Can
you
be common?”
“Never.” She laughed. “A common career sounds wonderful. A
common wife, however—that would be dreadful. You wouldn’t want
that.”
“No.”
“Jason Fireson, you are”—and she kissed him—
“exceptional.”

This time it was coughing that woke her. She had been dreaming about Jason;
they had just lain down in one of their many bedrooms. But he hadn’t
really been there, for this was a car seat she was waking on, not a bed.
She opened her eyes. They seemed to be working better. Sunlight was glowing
against the top of the seat, so much brilliance that the excess spilled down,
illuminating the steering wheel by her head and the floorboards below. Almost
blinding, yet barely dawn.
More coughs. She sat up and squinted, staring through the windshield and
straight into a sunrise that could not possibly be that bright. As if the sun
were no farther away than the next state, melting its way through the
Midwest. In minutes she would be consumed. She shielded
her eyes and saw a silhouette stumbling toward her, a stencil of blackness
carved from the night and accidentally abandoned to the dawn, its movements
frantic. Then he was opening the passenger door.
He was hatless, which was a shame, because this was a face best kept in shadow.
The nose as fat and scalloped as a cocktail glass. The green eyes sinking into
his shiny cheeks, which seemed to inflate with each inhalation. Though his dark
jacket matched his trousers, he wore only an undershirt beneath it. The
undershirt was white in places and red in others. He was holding a silver automatic
in his right hand.
“Hello there, kitten.” He sat beside her, panting. “Sorry to
disturb you.”
Darcy accepted the fact that her dream had vanished. She accepted the world
that was presented to her, currently starring Brickbat Sanders as the man in
shotgun.
“I wouldn’t call you
disturbing
, exactly. More annoying,
irritating.”
“Well, I hope to graduate to disturbing one day.”
“It would be your first graduation, no doubt.”
He looked exhausted and he breathed in impatient gulps, as if the world could
not satiate him. “Got any keys?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here if I did.” She wondered if he was
tired or injured enough for her to wrest the gun from his grip.
Brickbat’s hands were freakishly large—thick mitts with wide,
stubby fingers, barely prehensile. She once had found herself staring at them,
wondering how the man tied his shoes. “I’m not surprised to see
you’re behind this.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m
behind
it. You’d get a real
kick out of it if you found out who is.”
This was one of the longest conversations she’d had with him. He had been
an unfortunate part of Jason’s gang for two months, perhaps three. He had
ogled her with craven obviousness since the day they met. He seemed rather
disinterested in her rank, unshowered body at this moment, however.
“You seem a bit worse for wear,” she observed. “Did you have
a fight with your gentlemen friends?”
“Not mine. Yours.”
“I’m sorry?”
Still panting, he managed to purse his lips enough to
grin. “You know, I didn’t believe those stories myself, but turns
out they were true. Don’t know how Jason and Whit pulled it off, but
there they were last night, very much alive. And now they’re very much
dead.”
“What … what are you talking about?”
“Don’t go all Niagara on me, kitten. You should be over that by
now.”
She straightened up. She hadn’t had enough sleep or food to generate
panic. She repeated herself, but much more quietly this time. “What are
you talking about?”
“They came for you last night. Raised a fair amount of hell doing it.
Let’s just say I’ll be getting a much bigger percentage of the
ransom money now.” He chuckled, but it seemed to pain him and he
recoiled. “I told that son of a bitch Whit that one day I’d put one
between his eyes, and I did. Jason took a little longer to go, though.”
She turned from him and looked out the driver’s window. The sun was just
the slightest bit higher now and she could see the world before her, the fields
tan and dry and helpless.
“They aren’t the ones who freed me last night. Your own cohorts
did, and—”
“Yeah, I’ve figured that much out by now, thanks.” He
inspected the glove box. “But then your boys came in. They shot the place
up, but I rubbed them myself. Watched your boy sputter and moan right in front
of me. For maybe an hour, until he was done. That was time I shoulda been
spending looking for you, kitten, but I couldn’t help myself. Just had to
see it with my own eyes. And it turns out I found you after all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. I don’t care.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket
and removed a flask. He took a snort and put it back. “People die
terribly, kitten. They cough out all this stuff that’s supposed to be
inside them, like they’re being turned inside out. They move and twitch
in ways you’d never imagine. Couldn’t imitate it if I tried.”
“You will one day.”
He chuckled again. “Yeah, guess I will. But not as soon as you’d
like. Brickbat ain’t as bad off as he looks, and he knows a doc in these
parts can help him out.” He opened his door. “Gonna fiddle with the
engine. Try to run and I’ll shoot your knees.”
Darcy hugged herself. Surely Brickbat was only taunting her, trying to
level her into shock, keep her docile. Surely Rufus
hadn’t released her only moments before Jason and Whit arrived for her.
She was so tired and sore, her neck stiff, her ankles aching from myriad
scrapes and insect bites, the skin of her wrists torn by the cuffs. She
wasn’t thinking straight. She needed only to be free of this man, and
then in a real bed, and she would make sense of this.
The light on her world turned less harsh as Brickbat raised the hood. A minute
later the engine kicked into life, and she jumped. With the engine on, all she
needed to do was floor the gas and run her captor over. But before she’d
completed this thought the hood fell with a
whoosh
and a slam and there
was Brickbat aiming his automatic at her through the windshield.
“I’d hate to mess that pretty face, kitten.” He grinned at
her and she was, regrettably, motionless as he walked to the side of the Ford
and got back in shotgun. He moved gingerly, or what passed for gingerly in a
man of his size. His jacket concealed the source of all that blood; it bore no
bullet holes, but it was possible he’d been shot before putting it on.
Unless it was someone else’s blood and he was only grunting from
exhaustion.
“The road’s straight ahead a ways,” he told her.
“Drive.”
“I can’t shift in handcuffs.”
“Good point. Stick ’em out.” She hesitantly held her hands up
in front of her. He unholstered his pistol, and she was too stunned to say
anything or even move her hands as he reached, the gun perfectly level, until
the barrel touched the chain between the cuffs. Then he fired. It was the
loudest thing she’d ever heard. The bullet escaped through the open
window and the casing ricocheted off the ceiling, landing in her lap. Her hands
fell there, too, and they flicked away the casing as if it could still hurt
her. Brickbat chuckled.
Darcy tried to gather herself as she gripped the wheel, her fingers shaking,
the chains dangling musically from her wrists.
The Ford had been sitting there God knows how long and the sounds it emitted
were a warning that its resurrection would be brief. She and Brickbat bounced
as she drove through the uneven field.
Finally, she could see the road. Brickbat told her to make a right onto it, and
once she had he told her to go faster. To his chagrin, the Ford’s maximum
speed was barely a jog.
“I think you’d best look after yourself alone, Bernard,” she
said after
gathering the composure to speak again.
“You might as well admit that your little kidnapping ploy is a failure
and run along before things get worse.”
“That’s so sweet of you to be thinking after my best interests. I
appreciate it. But I happen to think it’d be best if I held on to you
until I get that ransom from your old man.”
“How are you going to do that if you’re a one-man operation
now?”
He didn’t answer. Jason had told her that endeavors turned deadly only
when steered by incompetents or by undermanned crews. Brickbat qualified as
both.
“About this ransom money, Bernard. My old man isn’t that flush. If
you think you can siphon two hundred thousand off him, you’re bound for
disappointment.”
He chuckled again. She’d never heard a more odious sound.
“Don’t worry, kitten.”
“I’m quite serious. He’s going through hard times as
well—relatively speaking, of course, but still, your negotiations will
drag on rather longer than either of us would like if—”
“I said not to worry. It’s all taken care of. You’ll see. Or
then again, maybe you won’t.”
As the sun rose, the sky took on the same scoured, yellowish hue as the earth
beneath it. The horizon was blurred, the difference between the two realms
invisible or at least meaningless. The farms here looked inactive; she hoped
they were, for she would have felt pity for anyone attempting to grow something
from such desiccated soil. Already she had passed two abandoned cars and the
splayed bodies of three horses. It occurred to her that she hadn’t passed
anything living.
Jason was still alive. She repeated this to herself, a silent mantra. No matter
what false evidence might be presented to her, she would not believe in
Jason’s death. There were many things you could believe in these days,
like all those practitioners of communism and anarchism, the Ouija board
enthusiasts and palmists and other bedeviled members of various cults. They
sought to impose their bizarre narratives on a world turned even more bizarre,
sought to contain the madness with their stories. Here is your villain, here is
the obstacle, here is how to be transformed from victim to hero. Everyone
frantically searching for a
new meaning of life,
because only then could you create a meaning for death. Jason was all the
meaning she needed, and, she told herself again, he
had
to be alive.
The Ford’s pace slowed to more of a canter. Also, it was rather low on
gasoline.
“I ain’t falling for it, kitten. Speed up.”
She tried to accelerate but the Ford refused. Her disbelieving passenger moved
toward her, pressing his foot on hers. Hard. Her toes were crushed, but the
Ford was only going slower. Despite the pain, she realized Brickbat’s gun
was closer now; he was holding it with his left hand, which was leaning against
the steering wheel as he focused his attention on the accelerator. My, those
fingers were large. But they were distracted, and surely he was weak from blood
loss, and perhaps …
She released the wheel and grabbed the pistol with both hands. Its barrel was
pointed out the window and when she tugged the automatic slid from his grasp,
but not fully. She couldn’t wrench it free. With his other hand he struck
her right forearm. He leaned into her with his massive body and the wheel was
spun counterclockwise. The Ford veered off the road with an emphatic burst of
energy that surely consumed whatever it had left. The tires slid into a ditch,
and had the Ford been capable of greater speed its passengers would have been
flung through the windshield. Instead they were merely jolted, and the gun was
back in Brickbat’s mighty hands. It snapped forward and struck her.
Her eyes watered and her hands formed a steeple over her nose. The pain made
her inhale sharply and not want to let the air out.
“That wasn’t even very hard. The next time will be. In your mouth,
taking out some of those pretty white teeth. And then I’ll get really
mean, understand?”
She nodded, closing her eyes. She heard his door open, and he told her he would
flag a ride. She finally let herself breathe. She would not cry. She would not
complain. She would see Jason again. And she would certainly get that gun.
They had taken her wristwatch the first night, so she didn’t know how
long she sat there while Brickbat stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets.
Eventually she heard a car approaching. She turned her head to see it, coming
from the direction they’d been heading. A maroon DeSoto sedan.
Driving on such a long, straight road, it seemed she
heard it for minutes before it finally reached them.
Brickbat moved into the center of the road and as the DeSoto slowed he held out
a palm. His other hand was in his pants pocket, where he’d hidden the
gun. Darcy thought about honking the horn as a warning to the oblivious driver,
but she didn’t see how this would help her.
Brickbat strolled to the DeSoto and she could hear him talking to the old man
at the wheel. Then Brickbat’s pistol introduced itself, silently, the
driver raising his hands.
“C’mon out, kitten.” She paused a moment, wondering if she
had any options, but could find none. Out she went.
Brickbat glanced inside the DeSoto, then checked the glove box and the trunk.
“Take shotgun,” he told her. “You can drive, old man.”
The DeSoto’s owner was gaunt but in a regal sort of way. His white hair
was carefully parted on the right side and he had intelligent, forceful eyes,
like a Civil War general. He wore a tan suit over a white shirt and a blue
patterned tie. Detracting somewhat from his formal bearing was the fact that he
needed a shave and, from the look of those eyes, a good night’s sleep.
Brickbat sat in back, behind Darcy. He told the old man which direction to head
and to drive at exactly the speed limit.
Darcy was just noticing something else about the driver’s appearance when
Brickbat asked, “What happened to your neck, old-timer?”
The skin of the man’s face and hands, like Darcy’s, was the pale
white of one who hires others for their labor, but his neck was red and lashed
with abrasions.
“I was hung two days ago. I was killed.”
Darcy didn’t stir. Brickbat chuckled, then said, “Seems I keep
running into dead people. How about that.”
Darcy’s nose throbbed and she searched the long horizon for evidence of
anything in this scorched world that might still be alive.