Caper

by Lawrence Sanders

  We started off, Hymie Gore leading the way again, carrying two suitcases. The rest of us followed in single file. I couldn’t believe we were doing it. Escaping from Antonio Rossi and his heavies. It seemed too good to be true.

  It was.

  Gore was about twenty feet from the opening to the alley when a man stepped out into the glare of the naked light. He was facing us. He just stood there in the center of the open space. Not moving. We stopped. I saw he was tall, slender. He was wearing a snap-brim fedora but no raincoat or topcoat. I couldn’t see his face, it was shadowed by the brim of his hat. But I saw the gun in his hand. It was gleaming.

  I heard Hymie Gore say “Aw.” I think that’s what he said: “Aw.”

  He started forward. This takes longer to write than it took to happen. Hymie hurtled toward the man. He dropped one of the suitcases he was carrying. He raised the other, vertically, so it was covering him from chin to groin. He was gripping it at the sides with both hands, elbows bent.

  I thought I heard him say “Aw” again.

  It all happened so fast, so fast.

  He was about ten feet away from the gunman when his arms snapped straight. The suitcase went flying forward. At the same time I heard the shots. This time they were sharp cracks, three of them in rapid succession. I didn’t know then if the bullets went through the suitcase. It didn’t make any difference.

  Hymie was hit. I saw him shudder. He paused a brief second, then went falling forward, pawing futilely at his side pocket. The tall, slender gunman was still standing, the suitcase at his feet. I heard two more shots.

  Then Gore crashed into him. The two of them went down in a tangled heap. I thought the gunman was trying to squirm free, get out from under the weight pressing him down.

  “Run!” Donohue screamed. His shoulder hit me, spun me around. “Go that way! To the parking lot! The car!”

  Dick and I ran, luggage bumping against our knees. We fled down that gloomy, walled alley, sobbing, gasping. I glanced back. Jack dropped his suitcase and shoulder bag. He darted forward. He had his gun out now. I saw him lean over, jam the muzzle into the ear of the gunman, who was still struggling to rise. The sound this time was more like a liquid splat. I saw something fly, glistening in the light at the end of the alley.

  Jack bent over Hymie Gore briefly. Then he picked up the suitcase Gore had thrown. He came running back toward us. He paused long enough to grab up Gore’s other suitcase and the case and the shoulder bag he had dropped. He came stumbling toward us awkwardly, trying to hang on to everything he was carrying.

  “Move it!” I heard him screaming. “Move it!”

  Dick Fleming dashed around the corner and disappeared. But I stood there. I couldn’t move, wouldn’t move, not till Jack Donohue came panting up to me. Mouth open, eyes wild and straining, chest heaving. I took one of the suitcases from him. I stumbled with him to the exit from that horrible place. Black Jack disappeared around the corner. I took a final glance back.

  I saw a squat, heavy man, guns in both hands, step into the light at the far end of the alley. There was no mistaking that figure: the broad shoulders, deep chest. The pinstriped, vested suit. The bow tie. A British bowler set squarely atop the heavy head.

  He looked up briefly. Looked directly at me, as if calculating his chances for a lucky shot. Then he looked down at the two men on the ground. He leaned over, held one of his guns close. I heard a single shot. A boom that echoed back and forth from the walls of the narrow alley.

  Then Jack Donohue was back, cursing. He clamped a hand on my arm, jerked me away.

  “Jack,” I said, sobbing. “He’s dead. Hymie!”

  “So?” he said. “Run, goddamn you!”

  THREE’S COMPANY

  WHERE WERE WE? I didn’t know—and I was driving. Dick sat beside me. Jack Donohue was in the back seat, alone, calling out rapid instructions without the benefit of a map:

  “After we get through Savannah, take a right onto Route 17. Just below Midway you’ll hit Route 82. Make a right on that and go west to Hinesville. Then southwest to Jesup. We’ll connect up with Route 301 south of Jesup and go down to Folkston. Then over to Jacksonville where we’ll meet up with 95 again. It’s a detour. Takes more time, but they’ll be patrolling the Interstate. They’ll never find us in the backwoods.”

  I wasn’t so certain. I thought Antonio Rossi would follow us through the thickets of hell.

  After the death of Hymie Gore, we had made our getaway in a wild, roaring dash across the shopping center parking lot. Jack had been at the wheel, and that escape from the crowded lot had been like running an obstacle course, a heart-stopping careen around startled pedestrians, grocery carts, and moving cars. I remember only lights flashing by, outraged faces, screams of protest, squealing brakes, the angry blast of horns, the screech of tires in tight turns.

  We made the highway with no signs of pursuit and headed south again. We paused on the verge just north of Savannah and changed places. That’s when I got behind the wheel and Black Jack crawled into the back seat and immediately poured us all drinks.

  Dick, I knew, was trying hard to control his tremors. He clutched his plastic tumbler of brandy in both hands, elbows pressed against his ribs. I was not so much shaken as numb. Too many things had happened too quickly. When I had asked Donohue the sequence of events back there in the alley, he had been cold and laconic.

  “I wasted the guy. I think he was one of the clerks from Brandenberg’s. I blew his fucking brains all over the fucking alley. Then I took a look at Hyme. He was still alive, but he had at least three pills in him. He was going; I could tell. So I split.”

  “I saw Rossi kill him,” I said faintly.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Well, that figures.”

  “He was such a sweet man,” I mourned.

  “Yeah,” Donohue said, “he was okay. Not much between the ears, but he was a good muscle.”

  “Did he have a family?” Fleming asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” Black Jack said irritably.

  I was about to reproach him for his heartless unconcern—but what was the use? No one would pity a dead Jack Donohue either, or grieve for his wasted life. He knew it and accepted it.

  But still, the death of Gore was on his mind—or perhaps it was the implacableness of the enemy who followed. Whatever he felt, alone there in the back seat, he drank heavily. He finished the brandy, lowered the window, and tossed out the empty bottle. He cackled when it smashed to splinters on the highway behind us. Then he started on a quart of vodka, drinking from the bottle.

  We drove in silence then. We were south of Savannah before Donohue spoke again. His voice was heavy and dull, the words slurred.

  “The funny thing is …” he mumbled. “You know what the funny thing is? That suitcase Hyme held up in front of him was filled with clothes. The slugs went through it like a hot poker through butter. I got the case right here. I’m feeling the holes, front and back. We got to ditch this case. But if he had been holding a suitcase full of jewelry, it probably would have stopped the slugs or deflected them—you know? It was just bad luck that Hyme had a suitcase full of underwear and shirts. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Luck, I mean.”

  Then he was silent again. When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw that he had stretched out. His chin was down on his chest. I hoped he was sleeping.

  I tried to remember all his instructions, but I got lost. I stayed on Route 82, going southwest. Finally, at Waycross, Dick and I saw signs pointing to the Okefenokee Swamp Park, and knew we were on the wrong road.

  We discussed in low voice whether we should wake up Donohue and see if he could get us back on course. But it was then almost 2:30 A.M., I was bone-weary, and I knew Dick’s ankle was bothering him. It seemed foolish to push ourselves over the edge of complete collapse.

  We had to drive another thirty miles before we found a motel that was displaying a Vacancy sign. It was another of the fleabag variety, but I couldn’t have cared
less. Dick woke up the night clerk and registered for two rooms, paying in advance. Between us we wrestled all the important luggage inside, then supported a stumbling, grumbling Jack Donohue and got him onto a lumpy bed.

  Dick said he’d take care of undressing him, and I thankfully went off to my very own room. It was, I thought with a shock, the first time I had slept alone in I couldn’t remember how many days. I took my personal luggage in with me, including Project X, and just did manage to take off coat, shoes, wig, sweater, and skirt before I fell on top of the ratty bedspread in bra and pantyhose. I didn’t know which smelled worse, me or that bed. But sleep conquered all.

  I awoke about 8:00 the next morning because some idiot was emptying trash cans into a dump truck right outside my window, and whistling mightily as he worked. After he left, with a great grinding of gears, I tried to get back to sleep again, but it was no go. So I got up, showered in a stained stall no larger than a vertical coffin, and put on fresh clothes, makeup, and a brushed wig.

  Then, feeling reasonably presentable, I ventured outside. A hot, smoky day, the rising sun hidden behind a scrim of white fog. I looked around. Mostly flatland. Some clumps of scrub pine. The earth looked old, baked, worn. And our motel was designed to fit right into that landscape.

  The Buick was where we had parked it, and I figured the men were still sleeping. I wandered over to the renting office and found a fat woman sitting behind the desk, filing her nails with a piece of steel as big as a saber. She was about half my height and double my weight, with an enormous purple birthmark that covered one cheek and dripped down onto her neck. But it hadn’t soured her: she was perky enough.

  “Morning, dearie,” she said cheerily. “How you this bright, sunshiny morning?”

  I won’t attempt to reproduce the Georgian accent. But that “morning” was more like “mawnin” and the “how” was “haow.” Still there was a softness to her speech, a warm lilt. I liked it.

  “I’d feel a lot better if I could get some coffee,” I said grumpily.

  “Got it right here,” she said happily. “Thirty-five cents a cup. Doughnuts go for two bits each.”

  “One coffee,” I said. “Two doughnuts.”

  She served me from a ten-quart electric coffeemaker on the end of the check-in desk.

  “We got canned milk,” she said.

  “Black will be fine.”

  “Yeah,” she said, grinning slyly. “Black is beautiful. Plain, sugared or chock doughnuts?”

  “Plain, please.”

  “Where you folks headin’?” she asked pleasantly as she filled a plastic container with coffee and wrapped two doughnuts in a paper napkin.

  “South,” I told her.

  “Most folks is, this time of year. Miami, I bet.”

  “Uh … maybe.”

  “Me and the old man plan to get down there one of these days,” she nattered on. “Last year we went to Disney World. Ever been there?”

  “No, I never have.”

  “Don’t miss it,” she advised me seriously. “Just the nicest place. I shook hands with Mickey Mouse. Can you imagine? Me, shaking hands with Mickey Mouse?”

  Feeling a lot better, I carried my breakfast back to my room. I put coffee and doughnuts on top of the stained maple dresser and pulled up a straight-back chair. I got out the yellow legal pads and ballpoint pen. Sipping the hot, flavorless coffee, chewing the spongy, flavorless doughnuts, I wrote as fast as I could, trying to bring my manuscript up to date.

  I must have worked for at least two hours. I was just describing our arrival at the shopping center motor lodge near Hardeeville, South Carolina, when there was a knock at the door. I peeked through the front windows before I unlocked. I was learning.

  Jack and Dick came in, carrying their own coffee and doughnuts. Dick was still limping slightly, but they both looked rested and cleaned up. They sat hunched over on the edge of my bed.

  “We missed the turnoff at Jesup,” Fleming told me.

  “But no problem,” Donohue said. “You kids did just right to hole up for the night. There are two or three ways we can get back on the Interstate from here. If we want to.”

  I looked at him.

  “If we want to?” I said. “I thought you were in such a hurry to get down to Miami?”

  “Well … yeah,” Jack said, “I was. Still am. But me and Dick have been talking it over. Maybe it would be smarter to find some backwoods hidey-hole for a week or so. Someplace way off in nowhere. We could lay low till the heat’s off. We got plenty of money for that.”

  “It’s Georgia,” Dick explained. “Jack says he knows the roads and the land like the palm of his hand. He says he can find us a safe spot.”

  “What do you think?” Donohue said.

  I thought that now the Donohue Gang was reduced to three living members, it was becoming more democratic. Our Leader was consulting rather than commanding.

  The idea of holing up for a while seemed more attractive to me than fleeing from our nemesis down Route 95.

  “Sounds okay,” I said, shrugging. “Where do we find this safe place?”

  “I figure we’ll go back to Waycross,” Jack said. “Then head west toward Albany. I know that country pretty good. I’ll find a spot.”

  “We’ll stop for food at the first decent place we come to,” Fleming said. Then he added: “Won’t we, Jack?”

  “Why not? We’ll take our time. No one’s going to find us in the Georgia boondocks. I’ll bet on that.”

  So we went back to Waycross, then headed north and west to Alma, Hazlehurst, McRae, and Eastman. Jack Donohue was driving. I sat beside him, trying to follow our route on a Mobil map. I thought he was heading toward Macon, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I wasn’t sure because four-lane concrete highways became three- and then two-lane. Then we were on two-lane tarred roads. Then graveled roads. Then one-lane dirt roads. Everything dwindled down until we were running between bare fields so baked and dry that we spun a long plume of dust behind us.

  We passed crossroad villages—no more than a filling station and a grocery store that sold beer and snuff. I saw men in faded overalls, women in calico dresses, mule-drawn wagons, and once, like something out of the past, a man in a field following an ox-drawn plow. The land here seemed bleached out, blooded and drawn, and so did the people. In our big Buick, dented and dusty as it was, we were visitors from another planet. To me, this was terra incognita, the earth sere and hard, a gigantic sun burning through the morning fog and filling the sky with shimmering heat. That sun looked like it might set right into a cropped field and char the world away.

  I glanced sideways at Black Jack as he drove, and saw the light in his eyes, the twisted smile on his lips. I thought at first that he was seeking the most deserted, malign, and remote spot he could find, thinking of our safety and the enmity of our pursuers.

  Then I realized it wasn’t wholly that. It was a return for him. He was coming home. After all his travels and adventures, happiness and pain, he was coming home. Yes, I decided, it was that. As paved roads shrunk to paths and we went jouncing over pits and rumbling across dried creek beds, I saw his lips draw back from his teeth and heard his low laugh. He was remembering.

  “Ran alky through here,” he said, “in a beatup truck. White lightning, panther piss—whatever you want to call it. Clear as water and maybe a hundred proof. Scorch your tonsils, that stuff would. But pure. No artificial additives or flavorings, as the ads say. Vintage of last Tuesday. At least we let it cool off. I had a route. Delivered to some regular customers and some local distributors. All kinds of bottles: milk, medicine, whatever. It had to hold a pint, at least. That was the minimum. With a cork. You got a dime back if you returned the bottle. Two cents back on the cork.”

  “How old were you then, Jack?” Dick Fleming asked from the back seat.

  “Shit,” Jack Donohue said, “I was small fry. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—like that. They used kids for drivers, figuring if you all got caught, what w
ould they do to you? Whump you up some, that’s all.”

  Something else I noticed: As we got deeper into hardshell Baptist country, Jack’s speech subtly changed. Not changed so much as reverted. The rapid New York cadence slowed, a drawl became evident, and I noted the same lilt I had heard in the speech of that birthmarked lady back at the motel. It wasn’t “you-all” or even “y’awl.” But there was only a tiny hesitation between “you” and “all.” And humor—dry, wry, and unsettling.

  “You heerd about how to handle a mule? First thing you do is to smack him across the skull with a two-by-four. That’s just to get his attention. This feller I knew tried the same thing on his wife. She just wouldn’t stop gabbing. He’s still breaking rocks somewheres.”

  This followed by a mirthless laugh.

  So there we were in a foreign country, being chauffeured by a native guide. Only Jack Donohue spoke the language and knew the customs. It was like a time warp, going back to the 1920s, a time of dirt roads, hand-cranked gas pumps, tin signs advertising Moxie and chewing tobacco. All the men seemed to spit endlessly, and the women looked old before their time.

  Another thing I noticed as we went slowly through those small, sad, crossroad towns …

  So many of the males were injured. One-armed men, boys with missing fingers, cripples jerking along on false legs or crutches.

  “Farm machinery,” Jack said when I commented on this phenomenon. “You get in any rural area, anywhere in the country, you find guys who lost a finger or hand or arm to a tractor or binder or thresher. Happens all the time. One reason why I got out.”

  We came, finally, to a village no smaller, no larger, no different from a dozen others we had passed through on the packed dirt road, trailing our cloud of dust.

  “Yeah,” Donohue said, “this is it. Whittier, Georgia. We’ll settle in around here.”

  “Why this place?” I asked. “It doesn’t look special.”

  “It ain’t,” he said, grinning. “That’s the point. Just another spot that the mapmakers forgot. There’s a hundred places like this around here. I know them all. One gas station, one general store, one feed and hardware store. Maybe a small branch bank. A restaurant and liquor place side-by-side. A church somewheres. Maybe a school.”