Tales of the Bagman

by B C Bell

  “Thanks, but—” Mac looked at the shotgun, “—I’d kind of like to take one of them with me.”

  Mr. Stephano walked back behind the counter and came back with some twine and scissors. Mac kept watch, tapping his foot nervously, still sweating up a storm. Everything had happened too fast, and then time had stopped.

  Except for the cops. The siren was getting louder. This was taking too long.

  “You’re dead, Mister...” Tony looked up scowling. “Mister… You know who I work for don’t ya? You know who I—” Mac stuffed an orange in his mouth. He tied Tony’s hands behind his back like he was calf-roping him in a rodeo and left about six feet dangling before he cut the rope. He pushed Tony toward the door on a leash.

  “Thanks, Mr.…?” Mac tried to act like he didn’t know the old man.

  “Stephano, it’s my store. And thank you Mr…?” He waved a finger back and forth in the air, still holding the shotgun on Tony’s failed thugs. “You gonna be the new bagman round here?”

  “Sure. Yeah.” Whatever. The sirens were getting closer.

  “Then I call you New Bagman, Mr. Bagman. Bigger and better things, Mr. Bagman.” Stephano winked.

  He knew who the man was behind the mask.

  Mac pushed the gangster out in the street toward the Blue Streak—until he saw it was empty. What was he going to do now? He looked around, holding Tony on the leash with one hand and under the gun with the other. Then he saw Crankshaft in the Lincoln. As he pulled on the leash, cars screeched to a halt on both sides of him. Gangsters in cheap suits piled out into the street with shotguns, revolvers, and Thompson submachine guns leveled at him.

  He didn’t understand until police cars, sirens blaring, slammed on their brakes behind the gangsters.

  They weren’t gangsters. They were cops—plainclothes division. Mac was surrounded.

  Chapter V

  The Long Arm

  “Drop the gun, and release the hostages!” A fat cop in uniform broadcast through the megaphone. It looked like the entire forty-second precinct house had emptied and they had all their guns pointed at Mac.

  Mac froze. Then he got angry. They didn’t need a megaphone. They were ten feet away, for crying out loud.

  “Drop the gun, masked man, or we shoot!”

  Dammit! This was the kind of thing that always happened to the Lone Ranger. Mac had only listened to the new radio show a few times, but it seemed like in every episode the sheriff always mistook him for a bad guy because of the mask. Of course on the radio, the Lone Ranger could shoot the gun out of the sheriff’s hand, tell him he was on the side of justice and all that crap, and everything would be all right. Shooting’s a lot easier on the radio.

  A million guns cocked, echoing in Mac’s head.

  The ol’ shooting-the-gun-out-of-the-sheriff’s-hand trick wasn’t going to work this time. Even if he could do it.

  “Drop it!” The megaphone was in his ear.

  Mac held the gun out in the air by the handle with two fingers. Everybody’s eyes were on that gun. On that hand.

  Mac pulled a hand grenade out his pocket with the other, pulled the ring with bag-covered teeth. He’d stolen the old trophy off Crankshaft’s desk when the mechanic wasn’t looking.

  “You breathe on one of those triggers and I’ll drop this thing! Blow up half the damn block!” the voice under the bag said.

  Some of the guns went down immediately. A lot of the police were veterans; they knew the damage a grenade could do. Younger men on the force looked to the older ones; evidently there wasn’t anything about grenade hostages in the police manual. Slowly, guns un-cocked, and hammers were lowered. A couple of the plainclothes squad held their hands palm out in the air—some as if to say, “Stop, you don’t want to do this,” others saying, “It’s all yours.” Everything was still.

  The fat cop raised the megaphone to his lips. Everybody twitched.

  “Drop it!” Mac yelled, and pointed at the cop. “You, especially! Just drop it. OK?”

  The megaphone clattered to the ground.

  Mac pushed Tony into the Lincoln’s back seat with the comatose wheelman. Crankshaft had him hogtied and face down on the floorboard.

  “And don’t try to follow me, coppers! I’m crazy, I’ll kill us all!” Mac yelled, and pointed the revolver at Crankshaft’s head.

  “’Coppers?’” Crankshaft said.

  “Listen mister, you don’t know who I am—” Mac tried to wink through the eyeholes in the bag. “—but I’ll kill you just as soon as look at you. Drive.”

  Crankshaft wanted to break his arm.

  Old man Stephano started screaming from his front door, providing a much needed diversion, and as much as Crankshaft hated having a gun pointed at him, he hated the idea of being arrested even more. Mac waved the grenade in the air, urging the police to move their cars. Crankshaft revved the engine and sped through. Less than a block away, Mac threw the hand grenade out the window. Crankshaft’s eyes went wide and he pounded the gas even harder.

  Mac had thought the old war trophy on the garage desk all these years was a dud. It wasn’t.

  Half the concrete on Grace Street between Fremont and Wilton exploded. Luckily, nobody had been there. Crankshaft gripped the steering wheel like he was going to break it in half and gave Mac a look that would’ve scarred flesh. Mac held his revolver up in the air, happy the gun was in his hands and not Crankshaft’s. The car almost blurred twisting in out of the traffic toward Lake Michigan in an effort to lose anybody that would have been stupid enough to follow the grenade blast.

  “Where we headed?” Crankshaft said, making a U-turn. “Police have our tag numbers and they’re probably all over the radio by now.”

  “Pull in that alley. We’ll get a new license plate.” It took all of five minutes for Mac switch tags with an old jalopy in somebody’s driveway.

  Crankshaft twitched his head toward Mac and made a gun out of his hand, hiding it in front of his chest, reminding Mac he was supposed to be a hostage. Hopefully, the men in the backseat hadn’t yet noticed the lack of threatening and gun pointing since he’d been driving. “Now what, mister?”

  “Head west. Then north, toward the river.” Mac said, cocking the gun again.

  Tony almost bit through the orange in his mouth trying to spit it out. If you wanted to scare a gangster anywhere in America, all you had to do was mention the Chicago River. In the last fifty years, more dead mobsters had been launched there than boats.

  Eight minutes later they were parked on one of the few wooden bridges left that still spanned the legendary waterway. Tony wouldn’t get out of the car. He anchored his legs on both sides of the door, struggling as Mac tried to pull him out. He shook, stretched, and contorted, until Mac hit him in the head with a gun butt—just enough to stun him—and unloaded him from the car like a sack of meal. Then he picked him up by the hair and led him to the handrail at the edge of the bridge.

  “Don’t worry, Tony. Look, no concrete. No tubs. No anchors. Nothing.”

  Tony’s head pin-wheeled looking for the giant rock that would drag him to the bottom, drowning.

  “It’s OK, Tony. It’s OK. I’m not going to kill you. I need you to deliver a message for me.”

  Tony’s head jerked up and down with the orange still in his mouth. He would have agreed to anything.

  “But you have to promise. Promise me. You’ll pass it along, word for word. Can you do that?”

  The orange bounced up and down like the ball in a cartoon sing-a-long.

  “You tell Slots Lurie there’s a new bagman in town. Everything from Irving to Fullerton, Addison to Broadway belongs to The Bagman.” The Bagman—suddenly it didn’t sound so bad anymore. “If Slots so much as takes lunch money from a school kid, I’m coming for him. Can you repeat that?”

>   Mac’s eyes followed the bouncing ball. He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and Tony almost jumped over the rail into the water on his own. The gangster’s eyes clenched shut waiting for The Bagman to filet him with the little penknife, all the while squealing like he was screaming with his mouth closed. Mac cut the extra length of rope off Tony’s bonds, but left his hands tied in front of him.

  “Don’t worry, it’s deep enough here—or at least I think it’s deep enough that—” Mac started to explain that it was only going to hurt a second, that the fear was worse than the reality, that he could have just shot him. But then he changed his mind, pulled the orange out of Tony’s mouth, and shoved him over the rail. The gangster screamed a good thirty feet down.

  Splash. Gurgle. There was no screaming for a full second until Tony came back up faster than Mac had expected. Maybe it wasn’t that deep after all. Tony came up coughing, and gasping.

  “You killed me! You killed me, Bagman!” Then Tony realized he was still alive. “My legs! They’re broken! HelpmeHelpmepleeeeeze!” Never mind that he was kicking with them as a slow current began to carry him downstream. “You’re dead, Bagman! You hear me, dead!”

  Mac fastballed the orange off the top of Tony’s head. Tony gargled and cursed his way down the river.

  “Wow. You see that Crank? Beaned him. I don’t think Walter Johnson could’ve done that. Must be, I dunno, at least a hundred feet—” He’d started to take the mask off with his hat, and turned around to see Crankshaft pulling the comatose driver out of the car.

  “Sixty feet. Maybe,” Crankshaft dropped the hogtied body in the grass next to the bridge. “Throw this one in and he’ll drown, not that that would be any great loss. I say let the mosquitoes have him.”

  “Aw, leave him. Somebody’s bound to pick him up sooner or later.” Mac clenched the top of his hat in his hand and pulled off the mask along with it. He was red and sweaty underneath it all. But the smile was genuine.

  “Let’s ditch the car around Montrose and take the trolley back.” He hung his coat over his arm and pulled off his tie. “Some disguise, huh?”

  “Yeah, you’re a real Lon Chaney,” Crankshaft said. “One more thing…”

  “What.”

  “Copper?”

  ***

  By the time Mac and Crankshaft had finished a heated discussion as to the validity of Edward G. Robinson dialogue, the two of them were cooling off with a pitcher of beer at what was quickly becoming their usual table at Barney’s.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Crankshaft said, pouring draft from the pitcher into his mug.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll open a cigar store or something.”

  “A cigar store?”

  “Yeah, a cigar store. You know, cigarettes, magazines, candies for the little kiddies.”

  “Takes money to open a store.”

  “I’m working out a financial plan as we speak.”

  “Like what?” Crankshaft said.

  “Like going back and seeing if the cops towed that Blue Streak off. My guess is they don’t know who it belongs to yet.” Mac hopped out of the booth and was headed for the door, when he heard a newsboy run by the window shouting Extra!

  He came back inside two minutes later and tossed a copy of The Daily News on the table in front of Crankshaft. The headline read Bagman Battles North Side! Underneath was a photograph of Mac with the bag on his head, holding off the police with a hand grenade and holding Tony on a leash.

  “..there might be something to this ‘Bagman’ character.”

  “We made the late edition,” Mac said.

  “‘We’ didn’t make anything,” Crankshaft said. “I have nothing to do with this circus.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Crank. We did good. How often do you get to say that?”

  “I get to say it all the time. And, I don’t have every cop in town and half the mob looking for me, either.” Crankshaft glanced around to make sure nobody was listening, and whispered, “Seriously, kid, you need to burn that suit and have all your groceries delivered for a while. The farther you stay away from a shopping bag, the longer you’re going to live.”

  “Don’t you see, Crank? That’s the great thing about the bag—instant low profile. I’m thinking there might be something to this ‘Bagman’ character.”

  “What, a life sentence in Joliet?”

  “A chance to do something good.”

  “Give yourself some time to think about this, kid. I know that’s not your strong point—”

  “You don’t even know my strong points.”

  “I know I’ve seen you eat. And surviving on institutional food would not be one of your strong points. You really want a future of beans and cornbread?”

  “Ouch, whipsawed into sanity by superior reasoning. OK, you got me. Speaking of food I’m getting hungry. You want to go grab something?”

  “You buying?”

  “Sure, long as I get to choose the restaurant. There’s a Chinese place over by Stephano’s I been wanting to check out.”

  “Let me guess, they’ve got a Blue Streak special.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Crank. I’ve got a plan.”

  ***

  The next morning, when Slots Lurie opened the floor safe at The Lincoln Tap—it was empty.

  Tales of the

  Bagman

  Bagman

  Part Two: Hard Earned Cash

  The Bughouse Massacre

  Chapter I

  Police and Thieves

  Garage owners and mechanics start on the first shift—usually around seven in the morning—when criminals and detectives are just finishing a night’s work. Construction workers like to start around seven, but often have to wait until later because heavy equipment can bring heavy complaints. So the only explanation for the bulldozer grinding up the ground inside Crankshaft’s Car Repair that morning was instantly, and painfully, obvious. Police or thieves were tearing up his property. In truth, it was a little of both.

  The middle-aged mechanic could hear the engine tearing forward as the shovel came up into view over the fence, full of dirt and pulling forward. It disappeared behind the Harlem Hellfighters emblem on the garage’s sign before pulling back behind the ornate lettering, once again empty. Crankshaft glared up and down the block, his eyes on fire, looking for who to blame. He didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was couldn’t be good. Cursing, he had his keys out in record time, opened the padlock and ran inside.

  There was a big man dressed in a pair of Crankshaft’s coveralls, his size threatening to rip the seams out as he manned the controls of the bulldozing beast. Oblivious, he continued to pull switches and dump dirt in a pile next to the garage office.

  “Whoa! Whoa there, cowboy!” Crankshaft waved his calloused, dark hands in the air trying to get the driver’s attention. “Mac! Mac!”

  The big man on the heavy machinery didn’t even notice at first, and then did a double take before he finally stopped playing with the gears.

  “Mac! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Hey, Crank! Take a look! Man, this thing is great!” the driver yelled over the engine’s drone. Mac McCullough, ex-baseball player, ex-criminal, and now part-time masked adventurer and construction worker, was probably the last person in the world that belonged anywhere near heavy machinery. He promptly proved it by popping the clutch. The bulldozer hopped about a foot and almost ran over Crankshaft.

  “Dammit, Mac! That’s how people get killed.” It was hard to tell if Crankshaft was talking about the bulldozer or the homicide he was about to commit.

  “Oh, sorry about that, Crank.” Mac turned off the engine and hopped down from the tread of the John Deere. There was a hole in one side of Crankshaft’s property about t
en feet deep. It was at least forty feet square.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” Crankshaft screamed.

  “I’m digging, old man, what does it look like? Now calm down, before you blow a gasket. No wonder the Germans were so scared of you Hellfighters.”

  Crankshaft Jones had been a hero in the Great War, part of the hardest fighting unit on the Western Front. In France he’d been applauded in parades. In Chicago he was just another black man with his hair graying at the temples. He inhaled and exhaled several times, counted to ten, walked away and stomped back. It still didn’t stop the steam from coming out of his ears. He started to talk quietly, but couldn’t pull it off. “Why arrRRRE YOU DIGGING A HOLE IN MY CAR LOT?”

  “Because I only have this bulldozer for a little while,” Mac said.

  Crank closed his eyes. His eyebrows went up into the furrows of his forehead as though he were asking God, Why me? He inhaled again. “No, Mac.” His voice was condescending. He pointed as a visual aid and asked slowly, “WHY? HOLE?”

  Mac started talking excitedly. “Oh, well, I was driving down Wabash last night and I saw this bulldozer sitting on the corner, and I had this great idea, and I figured since I gave you half the money from where I—” Mac’s voice suddenly sank “—robbed Slots—” he whispered, and then got too loud again, “—I figured, ‘Hey, we’re partners,’ and if I’m going to do this thing, I might as well do it right. So why not—”

  Crankshaft stormed away toward the metal shack that was his office, his head sunken between his shoulders, cursing under his breath. He unlocked the door, mumbling, “I’ve been good, really I have, I mean—yeah, I have. Why me, Lord? I fought for my country, I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t have to, even when I came home and there was nothing, and now you send me this—this—monster, this monster-man-in-a-child’s-body-person-thing…” He went on trying to think of a new name for the sub-species of Mac as he strode directly to his desk and pulled the cork out of a bottle. He poured himself a shot of whiskey and downed it immediately.