The Burning Day

by Timothy C. Phillips

  Another gunman had come up the fire escape, and had waited out there. Mad Dog fired two shots into the man, point-blank range. The gunman squeezed his trigger as he went down, and Mad Dog felt pain rip through his torso and his right leg, and then the world turned red, then gray, then black.

  Chapter 28

  I pulled into the apartment complex where I had seen Francis drop off Mary a few days earlier. I got out of the car and started walking towards the stairs. It was my hope that I could catch one or both of them here, and fill in the blanks on the connection between Morton and the goings-on out at the old Ensley airport. I was about to mount the stairs when I heard gunfire. I pulled my .45 and listened. More shots from the abandoned building. I started running toward the sound.

  The lobby doors were long gone from the derelict structure, so I rushed to the decaying staircase. There were two more shots, several floors above me. I went up the stairs with my gun out in front of me. Second floor, nothing. The third floor was the same. On the fourth, however, a dead man lay in a pool of blood outside of an open door. I took a cautious look into the room. Another dead man lay just inside.

  I went in quickly, gun first, and swept the room. Yet another dead man, hanging in the broken window, and a man on the floor, covered with blood, trying to right himself by pulling himself up on a table leg. I noted with surprise a puppy whimpering next to him.

  I went over, kicked a revolver away from the man, and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Easy, easy.” I turned him over and realized that it was one of the guys I’d seen in Lonnie’s bar. Now I recognized the puppy. “I’ll call 911.” I told him, even as I dialed the number. “Just take it easy.”

  The operator came on and I told her the situation. “Take it easy, help’s on the way.”

  “I don’t think so mister. I think that guy got me pretty good.” He looked absently toward the man hanging in the window. Incredibly, I noticed, he seemed to be smiling.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My friends call me Kevin.”

  “You’re gonna make it, Kevin.” But I knew I was lying because he had started making that snoring sound that people make when their lungs are filling up with blood, and he must have known it, too, because he looked at me with a strange intensity and said in a pleading voice, “Mister take care of my dog.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him, “What’s your dog’s name?”

  The man smiled his strange smile, and said, “His name is Oscar.”

  And then he died.

  ~

  I went to Mary’s apartment and let myself in. Though I could not say why, I took the puppy with me. No one was home. There was, however, true to form from good old Mary, a reminder on her fridge to meet Francis at a certain restaurant downtown in about thirty minutes. It was a place I knew well, a restaurant owned by Francis’ erstwhile boss, a place called Ganato’s.

  Chapter 29

  Mountainbrook, a stately house on a hill on a placid afternoon. The yard was impeccably landscaped, mowed and trimmed so precisely that the house seemed to rise naturally from the carefully sculpted ground. This house dominated a hill ringed by trees. There were no nearby neighbors, the owner having gone to great expense to buy his privacy. Around the property was a low wall. In the converted attic that was the third story, a library. In the library, a wide window.

  As Don Ganato gazed out of this window, he saw the quiet streets, the gently waving trees that lined those sleepy avenues, and the park, far beyond, strangely vacant and silent on such a lovely, temperate day. Below the window, the roses waved in mute answer to the swaying of the trees. A lovely day. As good a day as any, for what lay at hand.

  He walked out of his study, and down the stairs. Two men who waited in the hallway fell into step on either side of him. They walked into the library, where four other men waited. Was this the last of them? There were a few others in the yard, outside, he knew. Too few of us remain, Don Ganato thought to himself. Not all of the others were dead, he knew. Many had simply pretended not to receive his summons. They were waiting out the crisis, to see which way the wind was going to blow. When this was over, he would deal with them, he promised himself.

  The four men in the library were seated, cleaning weapons. It was to be war, the old way. The enemy was actually coming to him. He had underestimated Longshot Lonnie, in the beginning. He had failed to heed the warnings of those close to him. Francis had urged him to kill Lonnie while he was still a youngster. In the end, he had given Lonnie the territory his uncle had run his rackets in. What could be the harm? Don Ganato had reasoned.

  Anything to keep the peace, he had argued. Peace now, war later, Francis had told him, and now he knew that Francis had been right.

  Francis. Where was he? Dead or wounded, he supposed. Only dire circumstances would keep him from standing next to his Don in this darkest hour. Of all of them, Francis had been with him the longest, and was the most loyal. Don Ganato knew of no power that could turn Francis against him.

  One of the men looked up.

  “Frederico and the others? Rudi and Georgio?” Don Ganato asked him.

  The man shook his head. “Nothing. They went out in search of O’Malley men, but they do not answer their phones. We haven’t heard from them since this morning.”

  “Then you will not hear from them anymore,” Don Ganato said flatly. Now they were just this few. Everyone here knew what that meant.

  “We think they might be coming today. There is strange news on the radio. Explosions, first to the west of town, then to the south,” Joe Martini told Don Ganato.

  But not to the east, not in Mountainbrook.

  Don Ganato smiled at Joe. His birth name was Giuseppe Martinelli, and his parents had been born in Naples. Joe’s father had disappeared when he was a boy of nine. The man had made certain errors in judgment, and the Family had been required to make the most severe atonement. Joe had lived a hard life, almost all of it in the service of the Family.

  Joe was a drinker, so Joe Martini, they called him. He looked like he could use a drink right then. There was a slight tremble in the hands that held the Tech 9 submachine gun in his lap. He had a right to be afraid, Don Ganato granted him silently, and pretended not to notice his fear. He simply nodded and passed by.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous blast, and a shockwave rocked through the house; the entire house seemed to lurch, and then to sway beneath his feet. The air rushed out of the room, and there was a dreadful silence that lasted a second but could have filled a century, and then there was the pop-pop-popping of an automatic weapon. A man screamed.

  “Longshot is here,” Don Ganato said aloud, to no one, sounding even to himself like a tottering old man. Everyone staggered around, covered in dust, looking amazed, confused, terrified.

  The rattle of gunfire tore through his daze. A man groaned. Someone was pulling his arm. Joe Martini. “Get down, Don Ganato. Get down!” Joe had overturned a table, was pulling a sofa up behind it. “Behind here.”

  The room was filled with smoke. What was burning to create so much smoke? He heard people coughing. Don Ganato realized that someone had thrown a smoke grenade into the room.

  What had they hit the house with? A bomb? Dynamite? Much stronger than that, he realized. An anti-tank gun, or a bazooka. Some sort of military ordnance. He heard footsteps in the front of the house.

  “They’re coming in!” Joe Martini shouted to the others. The form of a man showed in the smoke. Joe and two or three others fired. The man fell before Don Ganato ever saw his face, a dim blue outline of a man in the gray smoke, upright one second, lying prone and still the next. After the man fell there was hurried muttering and movement on the other side of the smoke.

  “What are they doing?” Joe asked. Don Ganato said nothing, and realized that he didn’t hear what he’d been listening for. Sirens. Where were the sirens? Surely people would be calling them. There had been an explosion, gunfire. Lonnie couldn’t pay off every pol
iceman in the city. Where were they? He suddenly thought of it as darkly amusing that he, of all people, would sit here, wishing for the arrival of the police. He bit back a laugh with a nervous sound and Joe looked at him like he was crazy.

  Suddenly the house lurched again, under an explosion that seemed ten times more jarring than the last. The room exploded inward, and two men nearby fell backwards, as large splinters of wood from the walls skewered them. Joe Martini grunted and turned to Don Ganato as though appealing for some kind of absolution. A long dagger of metal protruded from his right shoulder. Don Ganato reached to pull it out, and snatched his hands away in pain. The metal was a piece of the casing of whatever projectile Lonnie’s men had fired into the house, and it was extremely hot.

  The Don wrapped his burned hand in the lapel of his jacket and grasped the metal again, and yanked it free of Joe Martini’s shoulder. The wound started to bleed profusely. “Press your hand to the wound!” Don Ganato told him, but Joe looked dazed and didn’t comply. He was going into shock, Don Ganato realized. He tried to think of what to do. He looked around for help, but all he saw were dead men. Then he heard movement in the hall again.

  The smoke was dying down, and Don Ganato’s eyes rose to meet the figures that came through the fog. There were four men, one in the front with an automatic weapon. He came into the room first, pointing his gun this way and that, then at Don Ganato. When he recognized the Don, he lowered his gun.

  So. There are strict orders to save me for last, Don Ganato mused.

  Then came the rest, two more hoods, one carrying the weapon that had devastated the house, some sort of light anti-tank weapon of foreign manufacture. Between the two hoods was Longshot Lonnie O’Malley. He was holding a pistol in his hand. He nodded to Don Ganato as he approached.

  “Don Ganato.”

  “It’s been a long time, Lonnie.”

  “Indeed it has. Years, in fact. I’d become accustomed to dealing with your subordinates, but it would seem you’re fresh out of them at the moment. So, I’ll deal with you directly, if you have no objections.” Lonnie hefted the automatic and chambered a round.

  “Lonnie, every policeman in the city must be on their way here.”

  Lonnie smiled. His blue eye looked directly at Don Ganato, but his green eye rolled in sensuous pleasure at some personal secret. “Ah, that. I think you know that isn’t going to happen. Well, in case you’re standing there awaiting the arrival of the police, I’ll just tell you. There are a series of gas explosions going off all over the city, carefully placed and timed to keep all of our benevolent First Responders away from here for at least thirty precious minutes. If people have called in the explosions, they’ll be understood as more of the same, mysterious gas explosions. Which brings us to the matter at hand.”

  Lonnie raised the pistol and fired it into Don Ganato’s chest, once, twice, three times. Don Ganato fell back and didn’t move. Lonnie stood over him and looked at him for a long moment. Then he shook his head, and fired twice more.

  Lonnie stared at Don Ganato’s body for a full minute. “So long, old friend,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Lonnie, this one’s still moving. Want me to . . .” The hood next to him said, pointing at Joe Martini, who lay mumbling incoherently in the floor. But Lonnie was through here, he realized suddenly.

  “No. Leave him. It’s all over. Let’s get the hell out of here. The coppers won’t take forever figuring out that the other explosions were diversions for our little visit with the Don.”

  “So, are we done?”

  “No,” Lonnie said again. “We got one place left to go today, or all of this was for nothing.”

  They moved out of the ruined house quickly, leaving the dead and the dying behind them, out through the smoke and the flame and into the sun, a group of bloodied men leaving behind the bodies of other bloodied men.

  As they drove away Lonnie considered his victory, and wondered why it felt so flat, as they drove across the Cahaba River and away into the burning day.

  Chapter 30

  At Ganato’s restaurant they were already clearing things out. People were taking whatever they could get their hands on, and hitting the street. It was clear that everyone knew that the Ganato gig was up.

  I had heard the first confused reports myself on the way over. I grabbed a guy I recognized as one of the hoods I had seen with Francis when he spilled the beans about his love for Mary. I asked him where I could find Francis. The guy was in a hurry and didn’t want to talk, but I put my .45 in his ribs and asked again.

  “Easy, easy. I thought you knew,” he told me. “He’s meeting Lonnie to pick up the dame at the same place we took her kid.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. “Her kid?”

  “That’s right. The redhead, Mary’s kid. I figured that’s what Francis wanted to talk to you about, Mary’s got a little boy. They were worried something was going happen to the kid, so Francis pulled a few strings without telling the Don, and we put the kid on a plane out at that old country airport. That’s when you showed up out there.”

  I thought about the airport gunfight, the one with automatic weapons and two rival gangs and no one getting hit, and felt a little stupid at last. It had been a sham, so that Francis could cover what he was really up to. There had never been any of Longshot’s hoods there at all, just Francis and his buddies down by the river, firing weapons. I remembered Mary’s strict prohibition of guns, and suddenly it all made sense. Maybe Francis figured firing guns was okay, as long as nobody was getting hurt.

  I let the guy go. “All right, thanks.”

  At least now I knew where I had to go, though I still had the sense that I was several big steps behind everybody else. Somehow, I should have known that it would all come together at the old airport. My job always seemed to take me to desolate places, those places abandoned by God and man. It was in those places that the issue at hand was usually decided, it seemed.

  ~

  The town didn’t look much different than it had a few days before. There were still the sullen, loitering young kids, black, white and Latino, wearing their colors and snarling their snarls. The same faded sign and dirt road awaited me. After that, though, were only unknowns.

  I parked back from the tarmac and made my way up to the low hangers, moving from one clump of bushes to the next. I stuck to the shadows, and I watched and moved when I was certain no one was watching.

  I finally got to the central building, and noticed three things. The first was a plane parked there. The second was that Francis and another man were standing beside it. The third thing was no good, no good at all. The other man that was standing there had a gun in his hand. He was facing me, too.

  So much for the element of surprise. He instantly focused his attention on me. He and Francis were standing there, Francis with his hands up slightly, like he was frozen stiff standing up.

  “Dom Morton,” I said aloud.

  The man who had called himself Henry Wiggins smiled his smug smile, and nodded. “That’s right. So here you are again, my good sir. Roland Longville, Private Detective. I suppose you’re a little pissed at me, after our first little dance in the hotel. Sorry, Longville, but I always come out on top.”

  “There’s a first time for everything, Morton.”

  He kept that smile frozen on his face, and it was the smile of the car salesman sizing up an easy mark. “Right you are, Mr. Longville. But no time for cracker barrel philosophy, just now. You know, I’m glad I didn’t kill you before. You amuse me. Now, give me your gun, if you please. And bring it out nice and easy, brother man. No funny stuff. I know you’re packing. I don’t like to shoot people, but I will.”

  I remembered Charlie Zellars’ ravaged body in the Earle Hotel.

  “I believe you,” was all that I said. I opened my jacket carefully and pulled my .45 out ever so slowly, with my left hand. I laid it on the pavement and shoved it over to Morton with my foot. He didn’t stoop to pick it up. Instead, he shifted his gu
n back to Francis.

  “Now, I have a bone to pick with the two of you.” He glanced back at me, quickly. “Just stay where you are, Longville, and maybe I won’t have to ventilate your black hide after all.”

  I had no intention of staying where I was, but I said nothing. I stood still. He was a slick operator, overconfident from years of conning the gullible and browbeating the weak. He had already pigeonholed me as someone who wasn’t going to be any trouble. It was obvious he was gearing up to talk, and for some reason he was paying me very little attention. I didn’t do anything to change his mind for the moment.

  I understood his obsession with Mary. He had come here to take Francis’ place, and collect Mary from Longshot. Just what he planned to do with her was anyone’s guess. Maybe he loved her in some strange way, but he didn’t think twice about using her in any way, however lurid, to further his own ends. Sure enough, he started talking, and it sounded rehearsed.

  “You shouldn’t have taken Mary from me, Francis. I was going to make us all rich—her, me and Zellars, too. They didn’t understand. When she ran out on me, she cut me out of everything. I can’t stand it when people cut me out of things. Zellars tried to betray me, too, after all I’d done for him. I remember when it was just the three of us on the road. Those were good times. Then, I turned around and both my good friends ran off on me. They forgot I used to cut them in on everything; they left me out in the cold. She has to pay for that. You can sure bet that Zellars regretted it.”

  As he talked, his voice rose with emotion. I walked silently up behind him—he had forgotten me for five seconds and that was a mistake. He suddenly sensed that I was there, and he spun, gun in hand. I got one hand on the gun, and as he turned he tried to get a shot off at me.

  He was quick, but I was far stronger. I pushed the gun up, like they had taught me in the Military Police, in another of my former lives, and Dom Morton clung to it, just like he was supposed to. But as I continued to push the gun upward in an arc, his refusal to let go made him topple over backwards. It’s the way you’re supposed to take down a potential assassin, or, at least it was back during the Cold War, before blowing yourself up, and your enemies with you, became all the rage.