“I’m going to knock on the door.”
He explains the rest and she smiles.
Lou’s got his hand held out to Erich. Erich stares at it, glares at Lou, and takes it. He pulls himself up as Lou backs away and they’re back where this fight started only minutes ago, Except this time the crowd is a lot quieter and Erich has three fewer helpers.
“We done here?” asks Lou. He’s favoring his right leg which he has drawn up from the floor. He’s balanced only on his left. His face is beaded with sweat as he waits for a reply.
Which is, “No; we are not.” Erich grabs the nearest man and jerks his Luger out of his holster. He’s spinning the gun in Lou’s direction when Lou puts his full weight on his right foot and leaps. His left foot, the injured one, snaps forward and hits Erich in the throat. Erich gags, drops the gun, choking, as Lou lands lightly on his right foot.
“Misdirection,” says Lou. “Always do the unexpected. I figured you’d forget which ankle was bad so I stood on the hurt one so I could kick with the other.” He takes a step forward, favoring the left foot this time. “Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”
Erich’s got both hands to his throat like he’s trying to hold it together.
Lou says, “You know, Erich; cruelty makes you stupid. You could have just killed me, but no; gotta torture the guy. Well…”
Erich’s eyes get wide as Lou takes another step and punches him, first in the stomach, then the jaw. He goes down, as beaten as the other three.
“And that’s how we won the war.”
Lou turns to face the silent mob of Nazis and says pleasantly, “I suppose you’re not going to follow his orders, are you?”
Turns out, no; they’re not.
Monk’s poured liberal amounts of gasoline on the base of the building. It’s old wood and he figures it’ll go up fast, but it’s also separated from the forest in the clearing by at least fifty feet. Plus it’s been raining and the woods are wet. Monk feels ok about the potential fire danger.
He waves to Cassidy across the road and walks to the door. She’s got the rife against the hood and is sighting in and Monk really hopes she’s got a cloth under it because he doesn’t want the car scratched.
He gets to the door and tries it. Locked. He looks at all the cars and smiles. They’re still inside. He begins to pound on the door with a rock he picked up. It makes a much louder sound than his bare hand would have and he imagines the scene inside. Who the hell’s at the door?
A voice yells through the door. “We’re closed. Beat it.”
So he does, with the rock, harder now.
“I said we’re closed!”
Monk keeps pounding. The door stays shut. A moment later he hears Cassidy shooting and he looks around in surprise. She gives him a thumbs up and points to the right where a couple guys just tried to sneak up from the back.
Monk smiles back at her and continues banging.
The door—finally!—opens and Monk tosses the rock though the opening. Inside he sees Lou up against the bar with a dozen men in Nazi uniforms around him. Lou’s sagging so they must have been hitting him pretty hard.
Monk steps inside and tosses the open gas can onto the floor. The liquid sloshes out and the room immediately reeks of gasoline. Nobody moves as Monk strikes a match…
And throws it into the gas. Now, they move. Like rats from the fire, they stampede for the door. Monk rushes past the blaze and grabs Lou, who has slid down to a sitting position on the floor.
Monk helps him up. He hears screaming and car engines roaring and over it all the flat crack of the rife as Cassidy shoots near them, taking out windows, tires, and actually blowing the hat off one guy.
Lou staggers against the bar, holds out a hand in a wait movement. He gathers his strength and says, “I can do this. There’s a couple guys on the floor I knocked out. Make sure they don’t burn.”
“Sure, Lou. Don’t want to hurt any Nazis, do we?” But he looks around, sees a guy on the floor and drags him out, dumping him in the dirt away from the building.
Lou’s hallway across the street and there’s a line of red tail lights in both directions as the Nazis flee. Cassidy’s watching Lou, rifle ready to attack anybody else who threatens her man and Monk’s thinking that there’s going to be a lot of guys with some hard things to explain this morning.
Like where are their clothes and why are they wearing those uniforms?
He crosses the road, leaving Erich to wake up and leave or get picked up by the police; it doesn’t matter which except he’s hoping for the latter.
He gets to the car in time to help Lou into the back seat. Lou’s bleeding in a lot of places but he gives a week grin and a thumbs up.
“Should see the other guys,” he says, just before he passes out.
Erich Klaussner wakes up to the dancing patterns of fire and the sounds of sirens. He sits up in the dirt parking lot of the bar and watches the roof cave in with a roar and a shower of
sparks. He has no idea how he got here.
The last he remembered is the shock of seeing the injured detective leap up and kick him, feeling the two punches, head and jaw. Now he’s lying in the dirt with a major headache and his
meeting place on fire.
The sirens are getting closer. Erich’s not too clear-headed yet but he knows he can’t be found here, not dressed like this. He rolls to his hands and knees, head down and spinning and waits for several moments for things to clear. With a huge effort, he pulls himself up to his knees and to his feet, swaying dizzily and finally moving.
He’s still in his Colonel’s uniform with its proud red Swastika armbands. The local police won’t understand why he’s dressed this way. They’ll arrest him and ask questions he has no answers to.
Still dizzy, he stumbles around the back of the burning building and into the dark woods
He watches from behind an enormous oak tree as fire trucks and police cars arrive. He doesn’t know how long he was out while the fire burned, but’s been long enough that the fireman have nothing to do but stand around while the walls crumble inward. The blaze reminds Erich of funeral pyres.
Eventually they all leave and quiet returns. Erich stays huddled by his tree, cursing the luck that made him give the keys to his Buick to Carlton who no doubt used them when he, and
everyone else, fled from the fire.
How did he do it? Erich can’t begin to imagine a series of events that lead from the fight to the utter destruction of the bar. He remembers how well Smith fought in the living room, even winning when Erich held a Luger at him.
He groans, realizing his Luger, kept all these years after the war and smuggled carefully
into the United States, is gone forever, melted steel and slag.
Damn that man! Even after beating all four of them—and how was that even possible?—the rest of the troop should have killed him. How had he survived eighteen armed men, overcoming them, escaping and burning the place down?
He had no illusions; the man survived. Somehow, he knew, he’d find him and next time
would be different. The next time he would die.
But right now Erich has a problem. He’s in the woods wearing a full Nazi uniform. He needs regular civilian clothes and he can steal a car or hitchhike, whatever it takes to get
home.
The sky is slowly changing from black to deep gray and Erich figures he’s got maybe half an hour before he’s in bright sunlight. So he needs to get new clothes and he needs them
right away.
He goes deeper into the forest, knowing that this land has been cleared for a century or more; there are no large forests anymore. He ducks branches, getting scratched and poked and once he trips in the dim light when his jackboot gets caught in a root.
Damn that man!
Erich gets to the edge of the forest and sees a fence. A fence means a farm nearby and a farm means a barn and maybe a clothesline and it’s still dim enough to maybe get away without being seen.
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He goes in the direction he hopes is toward the farm building—it’s fifty/fifty odds—and gets lucky. Less than a quarter mile away is a red barn and a white single story house with a brown roof. There are more fences, probably for horses and cattle and Erich is hurrying to the barn when he sees a man come out of the house. He ducks behind a fence to watch a big man wearing a battered old hat and a red checked shirt and ratty jeans and even at this distance Erich can tell the clothes are old and faded.
The old man walks slowly to an old green pickup truck, takes his damn sweet time getting in and getting settled, taking out a bag of tobacco and rolling a cigarette before starting the engine and backing up, taking the long drive away.
Erich’s been fuming behind the fence waiting for the old fool to move along. The sun’s just peeking over the horizon and there’s already enough light to make even the stupidest observer wonder what about what he’s wearing.
The farm is silent again and Erich creeps to the barn and slips through a rickety side door. The old building is ramshackle and crooked to the point of falling down. Erich sneaks around in the cavernous space, smelling rotting hay and old dried manure. There are no clothes, not even a blanket he could use to cover his uniform.
Damn. There’s no choice; he has to go to the house. He pauses at the door, eying the open span of farmyard he has to cross in the now bright sunlight. Is it better to be half naked or to be in his uniform? He knows that people here will react with hostility to it, and it’s too well known for anyone to miss its meaning.
The red armbands with the black Swastikas, symbols of his beloved Reich, are sewn onto his shirt. There’s no way to get them off and no way anyone will mistake what they mean. So; the shirt, at least, has to go.
Erich strips to the waist and wedges the shirt under a pile of rotting wood stacked in a corner. He goes back to the door and walks out. The morning has a chill but the sun is warm on his broad shoulders as he strides with military precision to the back door of the house. He grabs the handle, pulls the door open and enters a mud room attached to a rundown old kitchen. The appliances are old and the sink has a brown water stain. There’s a small table near the window and a small gray-haired woman sitting at it with a white mug and a lit cigarette. When she sees him she gives a startled shriek and leaps to her feet.
“Who…? What…?” It’s all she manages as Erich rushes across the room and slams a huge fist into her face. He feels bones break and the woman collapses at his feet, blood flowing from her mouth.
He leaves her there and hustles down a short hall past a tiny bathroom with a tattered green shower curtain. In the bedroom he opens the closet door and shoves aside the few dresses hanging there. He spots three men’s shirts and he takes one, shoving his arms into sleeves that are snug but fit. On a shelf above the sagging rod are two pairs of faded work pants, once blue, now just a weary gray. He pulls out a pair and tosses it on the bed, unbuckles his belt and sits down to remove his jackboots. He pulls down his pants and is reaching for the jeans when the back screen door slams.
A man’s voice yells, “Edna? I forgot my knife. Edna? God damn it, woman! Where the hell are you?”
Boots on the wood floors as the man—got to be the old farmer—clomps down the hall. “Edna!”
The old man comes into the bedroom and sees Erich standing by the bed wearing only his shirt. For a second the man is stunned. He yells, “Who the fuck are you? Where’s Edna?”
Like his wife, it’s all he gets out. Erich yanks his belt from the bed and he leaps to the man, throws the belt around his neck and pulls. The old man struggles, his hands grabbing at his throat but Erich tightens his grip. In a few moments the struggles cease.
Erich drops the body, goes back to the bed and pulls on the old man’s pants. He looks around for shoes, sees the old fool is wearing a pair of battered work boots. He strips them from the body and squeezes his feet into them. Like the shirt they’re tight, but they’ll have to do.
He goes back to the kitchen and is about to leave when he hears a gurgling moan from under the kitchen table. He goes over and sees the old woman trying to sit up. One side of her face is caved in where Erich’s fist broke her teeth and probably her jaw and she stares up at him
in mute misery.
“I am sorry Fraulein,” says Erich. “Truly, I am sorry.”
He curls his fingers around her throat until she stops struggling.
Outside he sees that the farmer has brought back the old pickup truck and he smiles at the turn of fortune.
“Excellent,” he says as he shifts the manual gear into first. “This will do.”
10 - The Screwiest Business I Ever Heard Of
Saturday passes by, mostly in bed, as Lou sleeps for fourteen hours, eats a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup carefully brought to the bed by Cassidy who sits by him while he slurps it though swollen lips. He’s got one eye shut and deep bruises on his face and body and a scratch so deep it may need stitches.
Cassidy makes him promise to see the doctor, young guy or old. “Doesn’t matter to me at all,” she says, trying for casual.
“I’ll be fine,” Lou says. “Really. I’ve been hurt worse.”
They both recall the beating he and Monk got at the hands of Duke Braddock’s thugs, that day when they broke into her apartment seeking shelter. Now here he is, beaten again and Cassidy’s thinking maybe California wasn’t so bad after all. So it doesn’t snow; so what? It doesn’t have Nazis, either.
Sunday morning is usually reserved for fat cinnamon rolls at Carter’s Donut Shop on Armitage and this Sunday Monk walks the three blocks and brings back two bags of them. The aroma fills the house as soon as he walks through the door.
Lou’s up and limping to the table and the mood is pretty close to festive by the time coffee is poured and cigarettes lit.
“You burned down the bar,” says Lou.
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“Wasn’t my first idea, but yeah,” says Monk. He’s got a bit of caramel on his cheek that Cassidy absent-mindedly dabs at with her napkin. The sun is pouring in through the back window and the kitchen is bright and homey. If Lou didn’t look like a demon this would be a Norman Rockwell painting. Home life of a Private Eye.
“What was your first idea?”
“Go in and wave a gun and they’d all surrender.”
“Yeah; glad you went with the fire.” Lou turns to Cassidy. “And you shooting at people! That was great. I mean, I didn’t see it, but Monk said you were a new Annie Oakley.
“I shot off one of their hats,” admits Cassidy, with justifiable pride. “Back home we used to shoot at prairie dogs, but mostly the guys were too drunk on beer to hit any of them.”
Monk says, “Sounds like a nice way to spend a day.”
“Does it? I was there and trust me, it really isn’t. But I could shoot at those Nazi jerks all day long.” She sips her coffee and takes a drag of a cigarette. Cassidy’s taken to trying new brands and this week she’s got the new Tareyton filtered ones. “They taste like crap, but, all cigarettes do. I don’t know why we even smoke these things,” she says, lighting one.
Through the new haze she asks, “Monk? What’s the deal with these guys? We won the war. We showed the world how really bad these guys were. How the hell can we have Nazis in America?”
Monk’s a pipe smoker and probably the stereotype of the intellectual puffing on a pipe came from people watching him. He tamps tobacco into the bowl and plays with the fire, drawing in and puffing out until the thing is lit, then he sets it down and seemingly forgets it.
“There are always uneducated people who follow lost causes. In fact, it’s often the lost cause part that attracts them the most. In the case of the Nazi group we met last night…”
“Met,” says Lou. “That’s an interesting word. “Joe Lewis, heavyweight boxing champion, met his opponents face with his fist, several times. Sure; let’s use met.”
“I wasn’t trying to dim
inish your role in this, Lou. In fact, I think it’s amazing that you beat up four of them with a sprained ankle. Or that you survived the beating they were giving when I came in.”
“About that,” says Lou. “The reason I didn’t get all that busted up is that there were too many of them.”
“Explain, please.” Monk’s pipe is still smoldering in the ash tray, proof that smoking doesn’t have to be bad for you.
“They got in each other’s way. They were all so eager to get a piece of me that they kept shoving themselves and even when they did land a punch it was pretty weak.”
“Interesting,” says Monk. “You were saved from being beaten by a crowd because the crowd was too big.”
“And the bar was too small. Seems like a good analogy to my fighting in small spaces problem.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Monk picks up his pipe, which has gone out, goes through the lighting ritual and puts it back down. He’s always had the habit of playing with something. It used to be solitaire, then the white queen from Duke Braddock’s chessboard. For a while it was a pair of metal ball bearings he picked up from God knew where that he rolled around with the most annoying clacking sound. Cassidy eventually wrestled them from him and threw them away.
“But there’s a pressing issue we haven’t addressed,” says Monk, who talks that way. “What do we do now? Are the Nazis going to come after us?”
“No,” says Cassidy. “Lou took care of that.” She gives him a look of sweet approval and he smiles and leans in for a—“careful!”—kiss. Monk looks away, annoyed. It’s bothering him that this is bothering him. He knows he shouldn’t be upset with their closeness, but lately it’s just been reminding him of how alone he is.
Cassidy dabs at her lipstick with a napkin. “Lou did that thing you suggested, where we hid our IDs in the car before we went in. So they don’t know who we are.”
“That’s good. Means we don’t have to watch our backs all the time. But it doesn’t address the issue; what do we do about the Nazis, and particularly about Mrs. Podalack?”
SERIOUSLY...?: A Lou Fleener Thriller Page 10
