Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 16:09

  * * *

  Five young men walked down the alley toward the panel truck. They were in a V-formation, two on each wing of their leader, whose slender frame made him appear taller than he was. He gave a hand gesture and the group halted. The leader approached on his own, hands open at his sides.

  “How old is this punk, anyway?” the driver said.

  “His DOB is six-ten-forty-one,” the passenger said. “Makes him just past eighteen. Doesn’t look it, does he?”

  By then, the young man had closed the distance. He stepped to the passenger side as the window rolled down.

  “Mr. White?” he asked.

  “That’s right, Myron,” Fred said.

  “I don’t go by that,” the young man said. “They call me—”

  “Get in the back,” Fred told him. “The door’s not locked.”

  The young man felt his comrades close by, but he didn’t look in their direction.

  The passenger glanced at his watch. When he looked up, his eyes were as empty and flat as twin panes of brown glass.

  The young man walked around to the back of the truck, opened the right-side door, climbed in, and pulled it closed behind him.

  The driver started the engine and drove off, without a glance at the remaining Hawks.

  The gang leader duckwalked toward the front of the truck. He knelt behind the seat, said, “Where are we going?” to the man in the passenger seat.

  “Not far,” Fred told him, his tone not inviting further conversation.

  The gang leader watched through the windshield as the truck navigated familiar streets. As they turned onto Devlin Avenue, he mentally catalogued the changing neighborhood, clicking off stores he recognized like a priest working rosary beads. I have to do this, ran through his mind. I’m the President. And this is our chance.

  The truck pulled into a gas station, but drove past the pumps all the way around to the back. The passenger hopped out and opened a garage door. The truck pulled inside.

  “Let’s go,” the driver said, as he got out of the vehicle.

  The gang leader climbed out the back and found himself in front of a collapsing-leg bridge table and three metal chairs.

  “Have a seat,” Milt told him.

  All three sat down.

  The gang leader reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, moving very slowly so as not to startle the two men. His hand was halfway to his jacket before he realized he was wasting the effort—they looked about as nervous as a pair of gardeners.

  “You’ve got one on for Wednesday night,” Milt said. “At the lot on Halstead.”

  “Yeah,” the young man answered, not questioning how the men sitting across from him would know such a thing. “That’s the best time—too many cops driving around on weekends.”

  “Fair one?” Milt asked.

  “Supposed to be. But you can’t trust the—”

  “Who called it?”

  “We . . . I guess we both did. Our warlord met their—”

  “Whole mobs, or ten-best?”

  “Nobody does ten-best anymore,” the young man said, unconsciously dry-washing his hands. “The others always show up, to watch, like, and they end up getting in it, anyway.”

  “So you’ll be outnumbered,” Fred said.

  “Not this time,” the young man said, pride thickening his voice. “We have a treaty with the Mercy Street Gladiators. So some of them might even be there with us, maybe.”

  “That was pretty slick work,” Fred complimented him. “Only thing is, we heard the niggers have reached out.”

  “Huh?” the young man said, puzzled.

  “You ever hear of the Chicago Vice Lords?”

  “I . . . I think I heard of them. But I never seen—”

  “They started the same place the Hawks did,” Fred said.

  “In Truesdale?” the young man said. “Man, you don’t know what you’re saying. I spent more than two years locked up there, and I never saw any—”

  “I don’t mean the same physical location,” Fred said, patiently. “I mean the same place. ‘Locked up,’ that’s a place, understand? Only, for the Vice Lords, it was in the St. Charles Reformatory—that’s up in Illinois, an hour’s drive west of Chicago. That joint, it’s run the same way they do it at the Truesdale Training School for Boys. Cottages, right?”

  “Dorms,” the young man said. “The cottages were only for the—”

  “Right,” Fred interrupted. “The point is, they kept you separated, mostly.”

  “Except for the sissies. They had their own dorm. That was the only place they mixed colors. But nobody cared about that. Even niggers got no use for—”

  “That was a mistake,” Milt said.

  “What?”

  “A big mistake,” Fred took up the thread. “You leave niggers alone, they’re going to plot. And that’s what happened. What they call those places, it’s all wrong. ‘Reformatory.’ ‘Correctional Institute.’ ‘Training School.’ What did they train you to do in Truesdale?”

  “Uh, to be a farmer, I guess. That was all we did there, just get up in the morning and—”

  “Yeah,” Fred said, making it clear he wasn’t interested in the young man’s recollections of institutional life. “Look, Myron—I’m sorry, look, Ace—when you do a burglary, you’re inside the house, you see a chest of drawers, where do you start?”

  “With the bottom drawer,” the young man said, promptly. “That way, you don’t have to close each one to get to the next one. Saves time, you get out faster. But you gotta be sure to—”

  “Where’d you learn that?” Fred said.

  “While I was in— Oh, yeah, I see what you mean now.”

  “Learned some other things, too, didn’t you?” the agent said. “And when you got out, it was like you earned your stripes, wasn’t it?”

  “My stripes?”

  “Proved yourself,” Fred said. “Showed you had what it takes. You were a Hawk before you went in, weren’t you?”

  “Just one of the Juniors.”

  “Sure. But by the time you came out of Truesdale . . .”

  “That’s when they first wanted me for leader.”

  “ ‘Leader,’ now, that’s the word we’re looking for, Ace,” Fred said, leaning in, flicking his lighter into life to start the youth’s cigarette burning. “ ‘President,’ that’s just a title. Something you are. But ‘leader,’ well, that’s something you do.”

  “The Vice Lords aren’t just a club,” Milt said. “They’re more like an army. Their leaders, they call them ‘generals.’ They practically run the whole West Side of Chicago. You know how big a piece of turf that is? More than all of Locke City.”

  “I heard, in New York, the niggers got gangs so big they swarm like ants when they come to bop,” Ace said. “But that’s just what people say. Here, they got more men than us, but nothing like that.”

  “That’s what I was telling you before, Ace. About the Kings reaching out,” Fred said, extending his arm to illustrate his words. “The Vice Lords are thinking about expanding their territory. And, Wednesday night, they’re going to have some men on hand. Not to fight. More like . . . observers. If they like what they see . . .”

  “I don’t get it,” the young man said, dragging on his cigarette. “Why would they even care? It’s not like anyone around here has got anything.”

  “Where do your boys get reefer?” Milt asked.

  “From Fat Lucy,” the young man said, wondering, even as he spoke, why it seemed impossible to lie to the self-assured men sitting on either side of him. “She runs the candy store over on—”

  “Right,” Fred said, approvingly. “And where does she get it?”

  “I don’t know,” the young man said, shrugging. “She’s always had it.”

  “If Fat Lucy was in Chicago, you know where she’d get reefer to sell, Ace? From the Vice Lords. You see the difference? That’s the wave of the futur
e. Consolidation. A little club like yours, no offense, you can hold your turf, a few blocks, maybe, but you can’t make a living from it. So it’s not really yours.”

  “Where we live, everything around there, it belongs to Mr. D.”

  “Yes. And where did he get it from?”

  “Huh?”

  “Pay attention, Ace. Sal Dioguardi didn’t get what he has because he had a rich father, left it to him in his will. He took it. He took it doing the same thing you’re going to be doing Wednesday night.”

  “Fighting.”

  “Yeah. But not fighting for . . . Do you even know what you’re fighting for?”

  “The niggers keep coming into our—”

  “Christ!” Fred said, disgusted. “Look, that’s the exact same reason you used to rumble with the Gladiators, isn’t it? Before your ‘treaty,’ I mean?”

  “We can’t let—”

  “This is why the whole white race is going to hell,” Fred said, exasperated. “You can get just as dead rumbling over who gets to sell reefer in your part of town as you can over who stepped on a piece of sidewalk without permission. You take the same risks. You go to the same prison if you get caught. If the Vice Lords decide to come to Locke City, it’ll be like someone spread hot black tar all over the North Side, and then brought in a steamroller. The only way to keep them out is to show them it’s not worth the risk.”

  “I . . . How could we . . . ?”

  “You got how many zips in your arsenal?”

  “Three good ones. There’s a few more, but I’m not so sure they’ll—”

  “And the niggers?”

  “Who knows what they’ll bring. Last time, they didn’t even have one, I don’t think. Nobody got hit, anyway.”

  “Wednesday, that all changes,” Fred said. He took a chrome-plated revolver out of his jacket, laid it on the table in front of the gang leader. “Ever use one of these, Ace?”

  “I once—” the young man began, then cut himself off to speak the truth. “No.”

  “Nothing to it,” Fred assured him. “Now, this here is a quality piece. Smith and Wesson thirty-eight, exactly like the cops use. Soon as the niggers even see it, they’re going to run. And when it goes off—boom!—it’s not like hearing that little pop from a zip gun; this thing sounds like a cannon.”

  “It’s beautiful,” the gang leader said, not reaching to touch the pistol, willing his hands to calmness.

  “Wednesday night, you walk toward each other, all in a line, right? Side to side? You in the middle, the leader. The leader from the Kings—what’s his name, Preacher?—he does the same. You wait until you get close before you pull this out, Ace. And two seconds after that, the whole world changes. That is, if you’ve got the heart to—”

  “Me?” the young man said, torn between anger and fear. “Me!?”

  “Come on! What are you talking about?” Milt said to his partner. “Ace wouldn’t be leader of the Hawks if he hadn’t proved himself.”

  “Sure, that’s right,” Fred apologized. “I know you’re the man for the job.”

  “How much for the pistol?” the young man said, tight-jawed.

  “Consider it a gift,” Fred said. “From your friends.” He brought out a box of bullets. “There’s twenty-four in there. More than enough for you to practice with, and have plenty left for Wednesday.” He released the revolver’s cylinder and sighted down the barrel, holding his thumb at the front end to reflect light. “That’s how you check, to make sure it’s clean, okay?”

  The gang leader nodded, watching closely.

  Fred loaded the pistol, each step a slow-motion demonstration. “You only put five in, okay? So the hammer always rests over an empty chamber.” He snapped the cylinder into place.

  “You with me?” he asked.

  The gang leader nodded again, realizing that he wouldn’t like the way his voice would sound if he spoke aloud.

  Fred reopened the cylinder, turned the pistol upside down, and caught the cartridges as they spilled into his open palm.

  “They come out real easy most of the time. But if they stick, you just use the extractor, like . . . this, see?”

  Another nod.

  “First thing, you get used to the trigger pull,” he said, handing over the empty gun.

  The gang leader hefted the pistol, surprised at its weight.

  “Aim it over there . . . at the wall. Good. Now squeeze the trigger. One long, steady pull. Don’t ever jerk it.”

  The gang leader felt the resistance of the trigger, pulled steadily. As the hammer came down, his face twitched, so slightly that it would have gone unnoticed if the others hadn’t been expecting it.

  “Now, you could cock it first,” Fred said, taking the pistol back and demonstrating, “and then shoot.” The hammer dropped—Ace flinched at the sound. “And that’s more accurate, if you’re only going to shoot once. But you don’t want to be doing that. You want to be able to squeeze all five off, bang-bang-bang, nice and smooth. Understand?” he asked, handing the pistol back.

  “Will it kick?” the gang leader asked.

  “A little bit. Nothing much. That’s why you have to practice. Get used to it. So it doesn’t make you jump when you go into action.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s no safety on this piece,” Fred said. “But if you don’t walk around with it cocked, it’s never going to go off accidentally. And, anyway, you’re always on an empty chamber, like I showed you, all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is it, Ace,” the man he knew as Mr. White said. “After Wednesday, the Hawks aren’t going to be small change anymore. You’re going to be the real thing.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 17:06

  * * *

  The knock on the hotel-room door pulled Dett from the easy chair as if attached by invisible wires. He said, “Yes?” in a calm, polite voice, slid the derringer from his pocket, and padded silently across the room so he was standing to the side of the door.

  “It’s me, sir. Rufus. Thought I’d just freshen up that ice bucket for you before I went off my shift.”

  Dett opened the door, his right hand in the pocket of his slacks. Rufus smiled his way inside, and made straight for the top of the bureau.

  “Yes, sir, this one ain’t but water now.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Yes, sir. You know, like I said before, anytime you want something, all you got to do is ask for me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You okay with your liquor supply, sir? ’Cause it just take me a minute to—”

  “I’ll be fine,” Dett said.

  “Mix you one now, if you like?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Thinking, He’s working way too hard for a lousy dollar.

  “I notice, a lot of the gents, they like to have a little taste before dinner, ‘specially if it’s going to be a real spread.”

  “You must be a mind reader,” Dett said, half-smiling. “I’ve got a big date later, and a big date starts with a big dinner, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes sir, I sure do!” Rufus said, grinning as he handed over the drink he had prepared. “Gonna be out late tonight, I bet.”

  “If things work out the way I plan, all night,” Dett said, holding up the glass of bourbon in a silent toast.

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 17:11

  * * *

  “In this life—our life, I mean—you know what’s the best thing you can have going for you?” Salvatore Dioguardi said.

  “People you can trust?” the scar-faced man sitting across from him replied.

  Dioguardi nodded his concurrence. “I know guys, you know guys, right in this thing with us, been from the beginning, guys who wouldn’t give you up even if they had to walk into the death house,” he said. “We got a dozen men fit that description, right in our own outfit back home, G.”

  “More,” the scar-faced man said.

  “But that’s not enough to m
ake a man trustworthy,” Dioguardi said. “A man could have a solid-steel pair on him, but that don’t make him smart. Some guys, you couldn’t beat their own name out of them, but you put them in the right situation, you could get them to tell you anything you want to know.”

  “You mean, like with a broad?”

  “With a broad. Liquored up. Or even just plain okey-doked—tricked, scammed, chumped. They’d be spilling their guts, and they wouldn’t even know it.”

  “So you’re saying the best thing a man can have is a good brain?” the disfigured man asked, waiting patiently for the punch line.

  “No, Gino. The best thing, for what we do, for our life, is when people think you’re stupid. When they underestimate you.”

  “Nobody underestimates you, Sal.”

  “When did you turn into an ass-kisser, G.?”

  “Hey!” the older man said, his voice dropping an octave.

  “What else should I say, you pouring the olive oil over me like I’m a fucking plate of pasta, Gino? You know me all my life. I always looked up to you. When I started to make my own moves, you were the man I wanted with me, from the beginning.”

  “And I been with—”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you have, G. The man I come to with my problems, that’s you to me. Closer than my father—fuck him in his eyes—ever was. I don’t keep you right next to me so you can jerk me off like some hooker.”

  “Sal, I don’t have to take—”

  “You’ll take it, G. Because it’s the truth. And that’s what I want from you, capisce? The truth. I can’t do what I got to do unless I see things like they really are.”

  “I never—”

  “Ah, you just fucking did, G. ‘Nobody underestimates you,’ the fuck does that mean? Everybody thinks I’m a real genius, right?”

  “No,” the older man answered, chilly-voiced.

  “No?”

  “No, Sally,” he said, heavily. “Everybody don’t necessarily think you’re a genius, that’s right.”

  “Now we’re rolling,” Dioguardi said, smiling broadly, showing a gleaming set of perfectly capped teeth. “So what’s the read on me, G.? Straight up, straight out.”