The Red Storm

by Grant Bywaters

  CHAPTER 16

  The next morning, after I went out for breakfast, I found one of Mallon’s plants standing on St. Ann’s, dressed as a panhandler. He stood at six foot two, one hundred and ninety pounds, and was costumed in stained khakis and a shabby overcoat.

  I moved toward him and said, “Since when did bums start wearing eighteen-karat gold watches and fancy shoes?”

  Through gritted teeth he hissed, “I’ve had my fill of you!”

  The man tore into his coat and pulled out a heavy revolver. I was close enough to grab his wrist with an unyielding lock and used the rest of my leverage to send my right fist down onto his collarbone like a fortified ax.

  The bone snapped and the man shrieked as his right side went limp, causing the revolver to hit the concrete with a metallic clatter.

  The turbulent movement sent crippling pain lashing out from my wound. I clutched my side as I backed away from him. Endeavoring to keep the pain out of my voice, I said, “Go call your boss. I’m done risking my life over a woman, and I’m willing to get rid of her. He can pick the time and place, and he knows how to reach me. I’ll be up in my flat waiting.”

  It required a calculated effort to get up to my room without giving in to the pain that boiled out of my side. With each step the agony cultivated new forms of distress, until I made it inside, downed half a bottle of aspirin, and plummeted onto the couch.

  Mallon called twenty minutes later. “Your black ass and that dame better be out at the wharf at ten tonight.” He paused before he ended with, “I want that book, too,” and hung up.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock, I sat in the passenger seat of Brawley’s ’37 Chrysler Royal. In the back sat Ducan, a rookie in the vice unit, and McKenzie, a deputy sheriff for the St. James Parish. Brawley had not been amused with the sheriff only giving him one deputy. “I ain’t kickin’,” Brawley had said, “he’s got loads of deputies that don’t do nothin’ but help old ladies across the street, and all he can free up is one?”

  We parked off a side road to the main route that led to the plantation. Brawley had torn through the Royal’s 700R4 tranny and made good time getting to our destination. Night came upon us as we arrived, and he picked the darkest spot to obscure the black-tinted machine.

  We sat in silence at first. Restless, Brawley twisted the knobs on his Roamio radio, getting nothing but static and hair tonic commercials.

  “Can’t I listen to the radio without these stupid advertisements,” he grumbled.

  He switched the device off and leaned back into his seat. More silence. McKenzie used a pocket flash to read a science fiction magazine that had a half-naked Amazonian octopus woman with six arms and a robotic man necking with each other on the cover.

  “Some reporter came into the station today,” Brawley said. “Wanted to do some tragic piece on Ranalli.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Says it was his editor’s idea. Seems to think the public likes them kinda stories. So I gave him a few tales the readers would enjoy. Like how he used to beat up all them whores that were workin’ for him. Told him about Brigette Leslie, who’s a permanent resident up at the state asylum after she jumped on the crazy train from the seven-day grind he was working her.”

  “What’d he think of that?”

  “He didn’t like it so much,” Brawley said. “He’s like ‘I can’t sell that! Give me some dope I can work with here, buddy! Don’t you got any shoot-out stories about him or a heat-packing moll?’ I said he should stick to writing about the jazz. That’s the new diversion from all the city’s problems.”

  Nine o’clock rolled around and soon a convoy of headlights charged down the street ahead of us in a bellow of wound-up engines. A caravan of killers.

  “And the ponies are off,” Brawley said.

  We let forty minutes pass before Brawley opened the door. “Me and the boys are going to sneak through the back. This being police business, Fletcher, I just want you to plant yourself out front. If anyone but us tries to go out the front or any of the side doors, you do what you got to do.”

  We crept down the side street and through the exterior property to the side of the plantation. Static filled the air, and made the hairs on my arms go erect. Far away, livid clouds sparked cyclically, but not bright enough or close enough to give away our position.

  We split up as we came upon the house. I broke off left toward the front, while they went up through the back entrance. No lights were coming from the plantation, nor could we see any lookouts or men canvassing the area.

  In black togs, I blended into shadows and secured a spot behind a substantial oak tree near the front.

  The oak not only provided me cover but gave me a clear vista of the front of the manor. I glimpsed inside the Favrile stained glass windows, with painted sugar stalks and palmetto leaves, and saw nothing. The house was destitute. The urge for a cigarette came to me, but smoking would draw too much attention, so I pushed the compulsion out of my head.

  Zella’s kiss had skipped in and out of my cranium since it had happened, and it chose this particularly inappropriate time to make itself known once more. I shook my head to clear it out and got interrupted by a hammering sound within the house. The windows flickered with the light of guns going off. The firing was unremitting, with only brief pauses for reloads. I held my own gun in the ready position and waited. The shelling from the interior kept its pace until an eruption from inside shook the building from the groundwork up.

  Silence followed the explosion. The gunfire stopped. I kept in idleness until I spotted movement behind the house. Not even needing to see the figure to know it had to be Mallon just by his awkward movements, I moved away from the oak and up to the front of the house and around the corner. Mallon was fleeing through the cane fields that lay ahead. I fired a shot in his direction, but he ignored it and kept going. I started in after him.

  I was intimate enough with my surroundings to maneuver through the darkness. Mallon, however, seemed to be not so well off. He stumbled and zigzagged aimlessly. I narrowed the distance between us and sent him darting in the direction of the sugar mill. I fired at him once more as he entered the refinery. The shot missed him by inches.

  I slowed up. I did not want to go in after him. If he wasn’t armed, the mill would have many readily available things on hand that could be used as armaments.

  I sized up the situation. His attack would be to find a place to stow himself while I went in looking for him like a dummy. He’d just need to wait for the right moment, and take me by surprise with whatever implement of death he was able to get his hands on.

  I approached the front of the mill, which was made of riveted steel girders and corrugated metal covered over by wood framing and brick. To the side of the building was a hefty wooden door made for machinery to pass through.

  I waited nearby as the sound of an engine starting came from inside. I stepped to the side in time to see the wooden entrance door crumble and the menacing front end of a Ford AA dump truck tear itself out like a caged animal.

  Mallon had busted out one of the front mounted headlights going through the door, and he was having trouble maneuvering without it. He caught sight of me and jerked the front end of the apparatus in my direction and accelerated toward me. I blasted three shots from the Colt and jumped aside into the dirt. I landed on my shoulder wrong and it screamed out in painful protest.

  Two of the bullets I fired hit their mark. Mallon fell back from the wheel but kept his foot on the throttle. The truck bent to the left and with a mind of its own veered in the direction of an emptied irrigation ditch as if it saw the ditch as the most suitable place for it to fall in and die.

  The machine swept in on the ditch at a high speed and went off the edging embankment like it was going to take flight. Its weight and gravity made sure it adhered to the laws of physics by plucking the truck’s front end down into a nosedive. The truck hit bottom and collapsed to its side with the harsh clanging rattl
e of smashed metal.

  I staggered to the wreckage and saw Mallon dragging his ruined body along the bottom of the ravine, now littered with rotted burlap sacks of raw sugar that had spilled from the traumatized machine. Near the edge of the ditch, he flipped himself over onto his back. His blood-soaked hands were pressed tightly against his torn stomach.

  Mallon didn’t move when I approached him. The left side of his ruined face split open, and a cascade of blood seeped down it.

  “You were right,” he said with labor. “This ain’t my climate. I’m used to making getaways in fast cars, not a goddamn dump truck.”

  “You did all right for yourself,” I said.

  He coughed, and blood brewed up out of his mouth. “I should have took your advice and stuck to the numbers. Haven’t been thinking straight since I found out Storm was here. That night has haunted me for years and it all came rushing back. I figure you know what happened after getting your hands on my book.”

  “I got my ideas, but I’d rather hear it from you,” I said.

  “I bet you would.” He laughed, and more blood came out. “Not much time left for me. I guess I’m finished.”

  I waited for him to gather what little strength he had left. “For as long as I could remember, I never was ‘normal,’ as my folks would put it. When I got abducted by Storm, it was just him and me for nearly a week before you showed up. He treated me nice. Well, as nice as someone of his caliber could be. And I felt feelings I never felt before. That’s why when you set me free that day, I didn’t want to go. I knew he’d kill me, but I couldn’t leave. After that I tried to stay the best I could for my folks’ sake. I got the idea maybe if I wrote the supposed sinful things down, it’d get it out of my system. Then that bitch scrubwoman found the book, and after I stole it back, I knew I had to hide it. So I buried it. I always meant to go get it, but after my parents were killed, I got sidetracked.”

  “Why did you kill your parents?” I asked.

  “Didn’t have much of a choice. I would imagine they always knew something was wrong with me. But when my dad caught me with another boy one day, things changed. I’d get beaten routinely, and it went up from there. Whatever love I had for them was gone. They were going to disown me and send me to a nuthouse. So one night while they were arguing over me in their room, I came in and shot them both. I covered it up best I could, and bribed the detective on the case. I offered him a big cut of the inheritance. After that, I took over the family business and started in on the numbers racket.

  “But I couldn’t forget Storm. I sent some of the best people to try to locate him. When they found him hiding in Boston, I left without thinking. You should’ve seen his face when I knocked on the door of the joint he was hiding out at. He didn’t recognize me at first, until I told him who I was. He invited me in and acted like we were old friends. Said he never was going to harm me. I guess I got caught up in the moment, and I told him how I felt about him.”

  Mallon went into a fit of coughing, and by the amount of blood coming out, I knew he had minutes left in him.

  “I don’t know what happened after that,” he continued. “My memory gets a bit fuzzy from all the blows Storm gave me. I remember laughing every time he hit me, because in some way I liked it. That seemed to really tick Storm off more, and he hit me so hard I blacked out. I woke up tethered to a chair, and saw Storm lighting a kerosene blowtorch. I recall him muttering that he was going to burn that queer pretty-boy face of mine right off. I don’t remember much after that, except waking up in the hospital.”

  Mallon laughed. “Maybe my parents were right, I do belong in a nuthouse. Because no matter what he did to me, I still had feelings for him.”

  “Why were you so hell-bent on killing his daughter?” I asked. “Storm was dead, why couldn’t you just leave it at that?”

  “Someone else robbed me of the chance to make him pay! Somebody had to suffer for what was done to me, so it might as well be her. Like father, like daughter.”

  “She ain’t nothing like her old man.”

  “Sure, she ain’t! The apple never falls that far from the tree. She’ll end up just—” He broke off, and looked out past me into nothing particular. Death came to him soon after, and his lifeless, mutilated head slumped to the side.

  * * *

  The inside of the plantation house was littered with corpses. I found Tommy O’Cahan lying just inside the back door with a chunk of his head missing, a frozen grimace on his face. There were more bodies in the main room near the stairs. The putrid smell of burnt flesh and bodies was nauseating.

  The last quarter of the staircase had been blown to pieces. Midway up the stairs was McKenzie, covered in a fresh coat of bullets. Farther up was a singed torso of what I guessed was a man. The body would have been unrecognizable, but I recognized the immaculate shoes I witnessed Buzz Martin wearing a few nights earlier.

  The first door in the hallway at the top of the stairs was propelled off its hinges. I went inside, and saw Brawley inside a cast-iron tub, holding his gun while clutching his right shoulder.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Big explosion, had to take cover,” he said.

  I helped him out of the tub, and on unsteady feet he stumbled out of the room and into the hall.

  “What went on?” I asked.

  “Hell went on. They were waiting for us when we came in. Made too much damn noise picking the lock. Opened the door and an entire goon squad was standing just on the other side. I knew they weren’t going to let us leave alive, and I wasn’t going to go out like a chump. I shot the closest one to me straight in the head and we bolted upstairs. McKenzie didn’t make it. Bastards cut him in half before he could even get up the stairs. I took a hit myself in the arm, but Ducan and me were able to secure ourselves in the bathroom. The elevated position helped our odds, and I got to picking most of them off. I sent Ducan to check the back rooms to see if Mallon was hiding out there. That’s when one of them got the cute idea of running up the stairs with a live pineapple to throw at me. He almost made it before I saw him. He had the pin in his mouth and was about to toss it by the time I shot half his arm off. I didn’t wait to see what happened, and dove straight for the tub. I guess I hit the bottom too hard, because I blacked out for a few. Came to just a few moments before you got here.”

  “Glad you didn’t shoot me when I came in,” I said.

  “Damn near did, but the rod is on empty. Best I could do was throw it at you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I figured it was you. If there was still any more of them alive, they wouldn’t have come through the door like that. They would toss another one of them bombs in the room and called it good. By the way, you’re the worst backup I’ve ever had. What the hell took you so damn long?”

  “I was busy going after Mallon,” I said.

  “Where is he?”

  “In a ditch behind the house,” I said.

  “I guess this evening didn’t turn out so bad after all,” Brawley said.

  I helped Brawley get back down to the ground floor, where he called it in. A few minutes later Ducan came in through the front door.

  “Where you been?” Brawley yelled.

  “I was chasing after someone. I went and checked the rooms like you told me to. Didn’t find Mallon, but in the last room I saw someone climbing down off the balcony. I don’t know who he was. When he got to the ground, and saw me on the gallery, he fired a few shots. I returned fire, and hit him, but he still ran off. When I got down so I could go after him, I followed the blood trail the best I could in this light, but it `got too dark to track. I didn’t have a flash on me, but I can tell you, he ain’t going to go far. I think I got him in a bad area. The blood was real dark.”

  “You did good,” Brawley said. “You got a cigarette, Fletcher?”

  I shook loose a cigarette for him, and we waited till the sound of far-off sirens came.

  CHAPTER 17

  It took days
for the officials to clear the plantation. Upon canvassing the area, deputies found on the main road the remains of a local, Leland Wendell. He’d been run over repeatedly by his own Chevrolet Series DB Master Commercial truck. The authorities believed it was a sure shot that the carnage was the aftermath of a reckless escape by the man Ducan had shot. Wendell’s wife, Bernadine, had been found five miles down the road. It was reckoned that she’d been tossed out of the truck going over fifty.

  The truck was unearthed off of River Road just inside New Orleans city limits. It had been rammed into an oak tree. Nobody was found in the wreckage, but a large amount of blood was found in the truck’s interior. There was an additional blood trail that left the truck and went to a roadside police call box a quarter mile up the street. A phone history of all the numbers called from the call box was made, but turned up little. The only number they got for that day was unlisted, and upon calling it, they found it to be disconnected.

  Word got to us as soon as the sheriff and deputies arrived that the rest of Mallon’s men had driven themselves right into a police chopper squad. Their machines were torn into till there was nothing left but the chassis and wheels. Mallon should have prepared his gorillas for such an ambush, but he wasn’t thinking straight. His carelessness was why he ended up dead.

  The deputies on-site did their best to barricade the ensuing news, but to no avail. The story hit the front page of the paper and was burned on there for days. The media found a new hero in Brawley, and played him up as the new crusader of crime.

  I made an appearance at the Department of Justice, where I surrendered written documentation that I had discharged my weapon and the result was the death of Mallon. Mallon being deemed a dangerous criminal and the circumstances leading to him being fired upon made it obvious self-defense. Yet I was told they were going to review the matter very seriously to see if it was in fact reasonable use of deadly force. I knew little would come of it. My involvement in the raid was being underwritten and concealed from the media, for political reasons, no less. The way the department saw it, a colored man taking out Mallon as opposed to one of their own was upsetting to them. But being kept out of the papers was fine by me. The few times I ever did make it in them, the kindest way they referred to me was as “the Negro.”