Feast for Thieves

by Marcus Brotherton

  The mayor’s face fell.

  “Miss Barker,” he said. “What would your father think of your uncharacteristic behavior? All those Sundays you stood in the pulpit, telling all us about the love of Jesus, and now here—”

  “Do as I say—” Bobbie’s voice turned calm and she pointed the revolver between the mayor’s eyes. “Or the next word out of your mouth will be your last.”

  The mayor obeyed.

  Crazy Ake slipped handcuffs out of a duffel bag and around the mayor’s wrists and ankles. He pointed at me and motioned to the hallway. “Through that door you’ll find a room with a grand piano. Beyond that is his office. Behind his desk he’s got a swivel chair with wheels on it. Go get it. Don’t make a sound.”

  I obliged, walked quickly through the living room and into the mayor’s office. Sure enough the chair was there. I carried it back to the entryway in case its wheels squeaked and set the chair down. A gag was already stuffed in the mayor’s mouth. Crazy Ake and I hefted the mayor off his knees and into the chair.

  “You push,” Crazy Ake said to me.

  The floors were polished oak, and I slid the mayor, wheelchair style, to the other side of the entryway and turned right into another hallway—this one longer than the first. The hallway’s ceiling was high; the walls on either side were painted a pale blue and bordered with white trim. Mirrors hung on the walls every ten feet with high ceiling fans appearing in regular intervals above us. A long carpet lay on the floor and I didn’t want to risk catching the lip of the chair’s wheels on it, so quicklike I tipped back the mayor’s chair to get him up and over, and the mayor passed by with ease. I glanced over at Crazy Ake. He looked positively gleeful. A tuft of hair was sticking up from his pomade-soaked head, and he walked with a jovial canter, as if his life had finally found its deepest purpose.

  “Miss Barker, you were a real peach back there,” Crazy Ake said, then patted the mayor on the back of his shoulder. “Say, I heard a good one the other day, Oris, you want to hear it?”

  Oris Floyd growled from beneath his gag.

  “Seems an old priest got sick and tired of all the folks in his parish confessing adultery,” Crazy Ake began. “During one of his homilies on a Sunday he looked over his congregation and said, ‘Y’all are getting too busy in this here town. If one single person more confesses to adultery, then I’ll up and quit!’ Well, all the folks in town liked the old priest real swell, so they gathered themselves when he wasn’t around and figured they’d get smart and from then on use a code word—fallen—when anyone around town strayed from the straight and narrow. Everything went swell for years, but one day the old priest finally kicked the bucket.” A trickle of foam appeared on Crazy Ake’s lower lip and he wiped it away. “So they got a new priest. A real young fella this time. And right after he gets to town, he pays a call on the mayor.” Crazy Ake paused, patted the mayor on the back of the shoulder again, and added, “That’s what made me think of you. Anyway, the priest was real worried and he says to the mayor, ‘Y’all need to do something to fix the sidewalks in this town, Mr. Mayor. You’d never believe how many folks confess to me about having fallen.’ Well, the mayor started to guffaw, realizing none of the folks had filled in the young priest about their code word for messing around. But before the mayor could explain what was what, the priest wagged his finger at the mayor and said, ‘Well, I don’t know why you’re laughing so hard, Mr. Mayor. Just last week your wife fell three times!’”

  Crazy Ake chortled deep in his sideburns. The rest of us stayed silent—including Oris Floyd. At the end of the hallway we turned left, pushed the mayor in his chair another twenty feet, and faced a closed door.

  “This here’s the game room,” Crazy Ake said. “Go on, Rowdy, open it slowly.”

  I opened the door.

  In front of us sat two overstuffed chairs and a couch—all empty. The room’s walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves of books. A red carpet lay on the floor. At the far end of the room was a stone fireplace with a stuffed longhorn above the mantel. A card table sat in front of the fireplace with three men positioned around it all intent on their card game. They didn’t even look up as the door opened.

  “You want us to deal you back in, Mayor?” one of them called over his shoulder.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Crazy Ake called back as he took the revolver from Bobbie’s hand and pointed it toward the card players.

  One of the men glanced our way, a man with a waxed mustache. He was heavyset and stood with a start, and the card table jostled as his knees hit its edge. Another man grumbled and swore, then glanced our way and stood up himself. The third took another drink from the glass in front of him, then realized the two men were standing. He glanced around him, then stood up wide-eyed and stared in our direction. All three were dressed in dark suits and smoking cigars. Two of them already looked tipsy.

  “What do you want?” said one. We all stayed silent.

  “You can’t do this,” said another. Again, none of us said a word.

  “Who are you, anyway?” said the third.

  “Just shut up and lie on the floor,” Crazy Ake said. “Rowdy, cuff and gag them.” He tossed toward me a duffel bag while keeping the revolver aimed at the men. Inside, I found six more sets of handcuffs and three bandanas. I gagged the men and cuffed their hands and feet, leaving them on the floor where Crazy Ake had instructed they lie.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Take their loot, empty their pockets. It’s simple burglary, Rowdy. Relax and make yourself at home. We’ve got some time to kill anyway. If we leave too soon, the boys at the front gate will get suspicious and we’ll have a shootout on our hands.” Crazy Ake walked over to the card table and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey. He kicked one of the fellas out of the way, twirled the revolver on his finger, sat on a chair, and stared glassy-eyed at the loot on the table. “How much would you say is there?”

  Already I was going through the last fella’s wallet, anticipating the question from Crazy Ake. The rest of the cash was already in one of the duffel bags. “Looks to be about fifty grand total,” I said. “Same as you reckoned.”

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s take a search around the house—see what else we can find.” From the other duffel bag he took out a long chain, the same one he’d dragged me with behind the truck, and strung the fellas together and then to a ring on the fireplace. They weren’t going nowhere.

  Crazy Ake giggled like a schoolboy at the start of summer vacation. He knew he owned us all. The three of us left the game room and wandered back down the hallway. I noticed a telephone near the entryway, but who could I call, what could anyone do? I kept up a rumble of prayer inside me and I knew from a glance Bobbie was doing the same. In a side room we found some silverware that looked expensive. “Too heavy,” Crazy Ake said and passed them by. Another room held a porcelain vase that looked to be expensive. “Too much fiddle-faddle,” Crazy Ake muttered, and we kept wandering from hallway to hallway, from room to room. Each room was filled with costly items, but Crazy Ake overlooked them all. Finally he asked, “Rowdy—if you were mayor of Cut Eye and had prime reason not to trust a soul, where would you hide your money?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “You always were the dumb one,” he said. “Miss Barker, how about you? Any smart ideas?”

  Bobbie got a faraway squint in her eyes and I could tell she was trying to think like a criminal. “Secretive like the color blue. The robber’s den is papered with hue. By and by, all will be dead. All cash lies under a bed.”

  “Emily Dickinson?” Crazy Ake asked. “Or is it Charlotte Brontë?” He was smirking because he knew the names of a couple of poets.

  “Radchenko,” Bobbie said. “A loose translation from the Russian.”

  “Ah. Under the mayor’s mattress it is. Sometimes the obvious answer is best.”

  We hiked upstairs and wandered around the rooms. The mayor lived alone except for his guards. I’d heard somewhere
they all stayed in a bunkhouse toward the back of the property. Toward the south wing we found the mayor’s bedroom. It was layered over in expensive tapestries. A gigantic four-poster bed squatted in the middle of the room. Crazy Ake walked around the mayor’s bedroom, picking up items and examining them closely. He sorted through the man’s dresser drawers. He splashed cologne on his sideburns from a canister on top of a side shelf. “Any luck?” he called to me.

  I had the quilt off the bed already and the mattress turned over. It seemed so stupid, but this was the mayor we were talking about here. Some folks in Texas are so wealthy they don’t know what to do with their money. Under the bed there was nothing but lint.

  “Well, it can’t be helped,” Crazy Ake said. He shot Bobbie a dirty look and eyed the bed. “We do have an hour.”

  “Touch her and I’ll kill you,” I growled.

  Crazy Ake walked over and slapped me gently twice on the cheek. “Don’t worry, ya rascal—all that virtue won’t go to waste. I’m seldom in the mood for untapped resources anyway, but I thought you might like a quick roll while we wait.”

  “I told you, it’s not like that with her,” I said.

  “She’s not one of the many, eh?” Crazy Ake laughed. “Or maybe she’s not one yet?” Bobbie gave me a blank stare. That was something she and I had never talked about before—my background with women—that was one of the reasons I’d been steering shy of her all along. It didn’t seem right for a fella such as myself to date someone as honorable as her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said in Crazy Ake’s direction. “You’re making me sick.”

  Crazy Ake complied, and the three of us wandered back downstairs. We checked on the fellas—they were still bound and tied. Crazy Ake looked at his watch. “It’s nearly two a.m. We’ll give it to three and then leave.”

  There was nothing more to do. Bobbie and I sat on the couch. Crazy Ake wandered into the kitchen and came back with an entire grilled chicken, cold from the icebox, and a six-pack of beer. He didn’t offer us any, nor was I hungry. I glanced at Bobbie. She shook her head. Crazy Ake drank two beers, devoured the rest of the meat on the chicken, tossed the carcass on the floor, and half closed his eyes. My mind was racing, always racing, trying to think of a way out of our predicament. I had nothing. We had ten hours to go before we reached Pachuca and fulfilled our part of the bargain. Until then, the man had us over a barrel.

  Bobbie took my hand in hers, the same hand that half an hour ago held a revolver. It was a sign of her forgiving my past perhaps, or maybe a sign she was worried about our futures. She didn’t belong with someone such as me. I was only trouble, all the time. I stared at our hands clasped together and I feared for those hands of hers—I did—the same way I feared for my own.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When the clock on the far wall struck 3 a.m., Crazy Ake roused himself, stood, and shuddered as if a chill ran up and down his spine. “You folks awake?” he called toward us. Bobbie and I stood. Neither of us had been sleeping.

  “The fat fella with the waxy mustache is Denton Bright,” Crazy Ake said. “We’ll be taking him with us but we need him ungagged, unbound, and full of whiskey first.” He turned my direction. “Rowdy, there’s three-quarters of a bottle of Jim Beam on the side table. Pour it down his throat. If he threatens to scream while you’re pouring, remind him of the revolver I’m carrying.”

  I grabbed the bottle and walked over to the man. His eyes were round as saucers. “Sorry about this,” I said as I undid his gag and began to pour. He didn’t seem to mind too much with all the whiskey going in, and within ten minutes the bottle was empty and he let out steady snores.

  “Get the chair,” Crazy Ake ordered, tossing me the key to the man’s handcuffs. “No sense breaking your back under all that girth. We can push him to the front door.”

  I undid the man’s cuffs, rubbed some circulation back into his ankles and wrists, and loaded him in the chair. He was almost double the mayor’s size and the chair scraped dully across the room, out the door, and down the hallway to the entryway. Bobbie and Crazy Ake followed. When we reached the front door, the girl opened it, looked both ways, and said, “Coast is clear.”

  “Good,” Crazy Ake said. “We’ll take the mayor’s Cadillac. No sense us slumming any more than we already have.” He cast a furtive glance at my old Chevy.

  I hefted the man in a fireman’s carry and lugged him outside. The mayor’s Cadillac sat near the fountain. Bobbie opened the rear door of the car, and I rolled the man over and plunked him inside. To anyone looking in the window, it appeared the man was passed out drunk and we were merely giving him a ride. Crazy Ake grabbed the duffel bags and put them in the trunk. He sat in the backseat next to the fella, and Bobbie sat in the passenger’s seat while I slid behind the wheel.

  “Where to now?” I asked.

  “Really, Rowdy?” Crazy Ake said. “Your head’s as thick as that man is fat.”

  It wasn’t a problem for me to unwire the Cadillac and get it started in a jiffy. I stuffed the wires up underneath the dash, put the car in gear, and headed back down the driveway. The fella at the gatehouse nodded and held out his hand for me to stop. I rolled down the window so we could speak.

  “Mr. Denton had a few too many,” I said with a nod to the backseat. “We’re taking him back to his plane. Mr. Farnsworth flew in on a charter, so he’ll be accompanying Mr. Denton back to Oklahoma. They’ve got some business together in that city. Mayor Floyd told us to use his Caddy for the trip so the men could ride in style. We’ll be bringing it right back.”

  The fella nodded without a word, tipped his hat to Bobbie, and opened the gate. We drove through and down the rest of the driveway, hit the main road, and turned right. When we reached Highway 2 we turned south and headed through Cut Eye. Everything was quiet and dark, and no one was out yet this time of the morning. I hoped we’d pass the sheriff or at least Deputy Roy making an early round, but nothing stirred. The sheriff undoubtedly would be worried sick when he found out Bobbie hadn’t come home last night from our trip up to Rancho Springs, but he was a solid sleeper and probably wouldn’t be awake to discover the fact for another two to three hours at least.

  We passed by the laundry mat and hardware store, the filling station and city hall, the mercantile, the café, the Sugar House Tavern with the school across the street, and the baseball fields. That was the town. Passed right through and I hadn’t thought of a solution to our predicament. I glanced over at Bobbie. Her face was grave, her eyes shut tight as if in prayer. When we reached Lost Truck Road we turned left and headed east.

  Workers were already out at the monstrosity and working the graveyard shift. The airstrip sat toward the rear of the construction site, and a large corrugated hangar had hastily been built next to it already. The entire site was gated and guarded, and when I pulled up in Oris Floyd’s Cadillac, the fella at the gate shot me a snappy salute like I was an officer in the military. I rolled down the window.

  “Just taking Mr. Denton and Mr. Farnsworth back to Mr. Denton’s plane,” I said. “Mr. Farnsworth is going to fly him home.”

  The guard nodded and we were through. We drove around the edge of the site and circled around to the airstrip.

  “That’s his,” Crazy Ake said. “The Beechcraft Bonanza.”

  In spite of our dire predicament, I let out a low whistle. It was a honey of an aircraft—that much was sure. I’d read about these last month in a magazine at the barbershop. The Bonanza was brand-new for 1947. This one must have been right off the lot, and already it set the standard for stylish yet well-equipped private planes. Mr. Denton’s plane was colored a shiny silver with a red nose and two red stripes down the side. A single prop sat out front. Two broad wings sat on either side like a regular plane. A strange V-tail wing configuration brought up the rear.

  I remembered the theory of the V-wing, according to the magazine article. The two surfaces of the wing would reduce weight and drag compared with a regular three-surfac
e straight tail design. This would make the Bonanza faster and more maneuverable in the sky, although some fellas had already nicknamed the tail the “doctor killer” due to a propensity to yield accidents, both on the ground and in the air.

  “Leave the fat man here,” Crazy Ake said with a thumb jerk toward Mr. Denton. “All we needed him for was to get us on the lot.”

  “You fly?” I asked.

  “Second highest marks at Chanute Field. They trained me on the P-51 Mustang. If I can fly a fighter plane, I can certainly fly this lump of tin.”

  “How’d you end up in the mortar squad?”

  Crazy Ake chuckled. “The colonel’s daughter turned out to be fifteen.” He tossed me the duffel bag—we hadn’t opened this one yet. He carried the other two.

  “Let’s leave her here, too,” I motioned toward Bobbie. “She got us inside the mayor’s house, just like you wanted. She doesn’t need to be involved anymore.”

  “No. That would never do,” Crazy Ake said with a laugh. “You’d get lonely. Besides, she’d just run home to Daddy and tip him off to where I’m going. Climb aboard.”

  Time was ticking, so I opened the passenger door on the right side of the plane. It was positioned behind the low side of the wing. Bobbie felt safer sitting next to the door, so I got in first then helped her climb aboard. Crazy Ake climbed in after us and shimmied his way over us and up to the pilot’s seat. He set the revolver on his lap. In front of him sat a dashboard full of gauges—altimeter, vertical speed, fuel, oil temperature, oil pressure, amperes—I only caught a glimpse of a few as I snuck a peak. There was only one steering column and it swiveled to either side.

  The cockpit looked too snug up front for two large men to sit shoulder to shoulder and I figured Crazy Ake could fly the plane well enough by himself, so I sat in the back with Bobbie instead. It was snug in the back too, and our knees touched side by side. I helped her fasten her seat belt and fastened mine as well. Altogether the plane sat five, but the farthest rear seat had been removed and a small wet bar installed. The sign next to the window read in bold red letters: “Warning: verify door is properly latched before takeoff.”