Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  It was a short wait, no more than ten minutes. By now that seemed like nothing to Nolan. He limped along past his own car, dragging his left foot. Nelson paid no attention to the handicapped, slightly built man passing him as he dug in his pocket for his car keys.

  Nolan whacked him in the nose with his right fist, blinding him with his tears and pain. He kneed him in the groin and rabbit-punched him when he bent over double. He took a step back and booted Nelson in the face, which straightened him out and knocked him flat on his back. Nolan grabbed his right arm in a lock and slapped him down fast for a gun. He wasn't carrying. So Nolan released his arm and hauled him by the left ankle along the road surface to his own car. He snapped one end of the cuffs on Nelson's right wrist and the other on his door handle. Then he went back to where Nelson had dropped his car keys.

  The cop's gun and shield were in the glove compartment. He left the VCR and stereo amplifier in the car trunk. They were probably stolen, but he had no proof of that and would risk robbery charges himself if they turned out to be genu inely owned by the fugitive. But he had the shield and gun—and that was what the Youngstown cops cared about.

  Errol Nelson was on his feet when Nolan came back. He was big and menacing and was trying to rip off the door handle on the other end of the cuffs.

  “I ain't going nowhere with you, scumbag,” he said, snarling. “You're a Youngstown cop operating over the state line, and so long as I keep you here, you're the who's going to be busted, not me.”

  Nolan went around to the other side of the car while he told Nelson who he was. He put the cop's gun and shield in the glove compartment and drew out some papers that he showed Nelson across the car roof by a streetlight.

  “Here's your surrender piece, Nelson. Know what that is? It's from the bail bondsman you cheated by skipping town. And this paper here is a certified copy of the bond on which you were released. Now, these two papers together make a warrant a bounty hunter can use. I could take you to Seattle from here if that's what these papers said, but lucky for me, I just got to run you in to Youngstown.”

  “I ain't going nowhere and you can't make me. You come around this side of the car, I'll tear you apart with one hand and kick your head in. You won't catch me by surprise this time.”

  Nolan smiled and climbed in behind the wheel. He started the car and moved out into the road at six or seven miles per hour. Nelson ran alongside, shouting and cursing. When he fell, Nolan slammed on the brakes, but he wasn't in time to prevent Nelson's right arm from being nearly wrenched out of its socket. Blood flowed from his wrist where the metal had cut the skin and soaked into his pants at his torn kneecaps. Nelson took a second fall before he agreed to be cuffed and sit quietly in the back.

  Joe was feeling pretty good about his night's work when he arrived back at the Bunch o' Shamrock.

  “There was a phone call for you,” the barkeep said. “Guy with a foreign accent. He's called for you here before.” He gave Joe a severe look like he should stay on the straight and narrow now and not go back to whatever it was he had been doing before.

  Joe guessed it might be Andre Verdoux. “He didn't leave a number to call back?” Joe asked, surprised.

  “You told me you were coming back later, so I told him to call again. I'm not your fucking social secretary, Nolan.”

  The phone rang and the barkeep picked it up and nodded to Nolan. But it was not Andre Verdoux on the phone, as Joe had hoped, nor was it Mike Campbell. It was the Youngstown plainclothesman who had tipped him that Errol Nelson was in Pulaski.

  “You brought him in a little more than an hour ago, right, Joe? You're not going to believe this. Even I don't believe this, and I see bullshit from morning till night, week in, week out. The Nelson guy jumped twelve-thousand-dollar bail and allegedly wasted that store owner who was to testify against him. Do I have the facts straight?”

  “Those are some of them,” Nolan agreed.

  “Some half-assed judge has just released him again on a seven-thousand-dollar bond.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Not even Jesus would have turned that sucker loose.”

  This time Joe ordered a whiskey at the bar. When Andre's call finally came, as usual all Joe said was, “Count me in. Just tell me when.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The big Australian looked out of place on the rear deck of the fancy motor yacht purring into dock at the exclusive resort colony on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. His cropped straw-yellow hair was only slightly longer than the several days growth of yellow stubble that covered his red jowls. His broken nose, cauliflower ears, and blubbery lips looked like those of a sparring partner in a pro boxing training camp. His long powerful arms hung from broad shoulders on a stocky body. His fists were huge and gnarled. Definitely not the portrait of an average luxury yacht owner. That was how men saw Bob Murphy. Women saw him differently. They noticed that he liked them, that his brown eyes were soft and understanding, that he actually listened to what they had to say.

  Murphy was a loud, raucous Australian outbacker with a tranquil marriage to a wealthy New England socialite. She was no beauty, any more than he was, and to the continuing amazement and envy of their friends they kept their romance going strong despite years of marriage. They spent summers in the Green Mountains of Vermont at his wife’s old family place. They wintered in Palm Beach, at another of his wife’s old family places. And now they were cruising north with the spring in his wife’s family’s luxury yacht, registered these days in Bob Murphy’s name, with stopovers scheduled for Hilton Head, Charleston, the Chesapeake, Manhattan and Montauk, with a few days social activity at each place before dropping anchor in summer waters at Newport, Rhode Island. Bob liked life aboard the yacht when it was moving; Eunice put up with that in anticipation of the social gatherings she could organize at each port of call. Bob hated the parties on board, with some clown tinkling on the white baby grand, the crew serving as champagne waiters, and people in new deck shoes whose names he could not remember saying to him, “So you’re Eunice’s husband.”

  Bob didn’t give a damn that most of them regarded him a some sort of leech or parasite on a poor little rich girl. Eunice herself knew that he cared little for money and was happier with a gun on a duck swamp or a rod and line at a good fishing spot than he was hobnobbing with wealthy trendies or old-money horsey types.

  Few people knew that Bob more or less paid his own way from his mere work with Mad Mike. Campbell and he went back a long way. They had met while fighting the Cubans in Angola. Murphy had been in Vietnam with the Australian army but had not known Campbell there, and before that, he had fought communists in the Malayan jungles with the British army. As a Green Beret colonel fresh from the Southeast Asia conflict, Campbell had thought when they met in Angola that no one could show him any new tricks in combat. Bob Murphy had shown him some and had saved his life more than once by coming up with something neither Campbell nor the enemy had ever seen before. Eunice had been on peace marches to Washington while Bob was fighting in Vietnam; they had yet to meet. Now she dismissed his mere activities along with his hunting, fishing, and drinking. It was just something that men did. The nature of the beast. She was pleased at the fact that womanizing was not also on the list and a bit disappointed that Bob could be very unpleasant to her distinguished guests.

  But this night at Hilton Head he was on his best behavior and apparently more or less sober. He chatted with people and even remembered some of their names while he introduced them to others. Eunice did not complain when he eased away early to their stateroom for a long night’s sleep. He was up two hours before dawn, stalking up and down the dock, until a battered station wagon arrived and he climbed in the front seat with two other men.

  “Good to see you, Bryce,” Murphy said.

  “This here is Don Crockett,” Bryce said from behind the wheel, and Bob shook hands with the man between them. “He’s the county man where we’re going this morning.”

  Bob Murphy had cont
acted Bryce Cummings by radiotelephone while the yacht was still offshore, and it was looking forward to this day’s trip with him that had made Bob so agreeable to guests the previous evening. Bryce had been invited but laughingly declined the invitation to the plush party aboard the yacht, which many others would have given their eyeteeth for. Bryce was a tough Georgian whom Bob had once fought outside a bar in Savannah because Bob was drunk and had acidentally bumped against him, and Bryce hated liquor and anyone carrying it in his gut. Bryce lost that fight, but the two men got to talking down at the police station and were soon amused at each other’s absurdities.

  Bryce Cummings was an agent for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms stationed in Beaufort, through which they drove. Don Crockett was an alcoholic-beverage officer for Colleton County, immediately north of Beaufort County. Murphy had been out with Bryce a few times over the years, yet hadn’t met Crockett before, although it seemed as if the two men worked together very often. They kidded each other like old friends as the station wagon wound down tiny back roads in the half light of dawn.

  “Hope you feel like a good walk this morning, Bob,” Bryce said. “Where we’re going is right deep in the woods. We was back in there yesterday morning, and the mash was just nice and ready to go. We’re betting they’ll be working there this morning, wanting to finish the run before the heat of the day.”

  “That mash’ll turn sour if they don’t run it today,” Crockett confirmed, “unless they was to add more sugar, and they have no call to do that.”

  Bob listened to their tales of busts they had made together, both red liquor and white liquor. For Bryce those were the only kinds of liquor. Red liquor covered all legitimately manufactured whiskey sold by bootleggers after hours and on Sundays in wet counties, or at any time in dry counties. White liquor was moonshine, made often by families with generations of tradition in the business. This morning they were after a still that had been accidentally pinpointed in the woods from an aerial forestry survey photo.

  “What gets me, Bryce, is I ain’t got no idea who’s running this still, and damn, I pride myself on knowing everyone in this part of Colleton County who might be tempted to let anything more than a glass of apple juice ferment.” Don Crockett was taking this still almost as a personal insult.

  “They always come up with something new,” Bryce said, “which is how we get to keep our jobs. Best one they done on me recently was over near Govan in Bamberg County. Fella there turns the rooms of a nice big ranch house into vats by nailing plywood to the floors and up the walls to just below window level. He’s got four rooms with thousands of gallons of mash at different stages, and his cooker, doubler, and cooler are set in a central room so he can run each vat of mash as it comes ready. I don’t like to even think how long he was operating there right under my nose. Last place I ever thought of looking, a nice suburban house with children’s swings out on the lawn.”

  “How did you discover it?” Bob asked.

  Bryce grinned. “By chance I caught a local fella red-handed at his still. He was mad as hell, not so much at me but at who might have given him away. I didn’t tell him no one had, that I had come across him by smelling his still at work in the woods—it smelled like a bakery, all yeasty like. I said to him, ‘You got some mean competition in these parts, my friend.’ So, sitting in the car, he got to thinking which of his competiton turned him in to get rid of him, and he ended by giving me a name that was new to me and that led to the still in the house.”

  “You’re a real nice guy,” Murphy said. “Been shot at lately?”

  “Sure. All the time. But no one’s hit me in the past eight years. They don’t like revenuers hereabouts.”

  The federal, state, and county agents were known as revenuers because the illegal sale of red liquor and the making and sale of white liquor was treated not as a regular crime but as the evasion of taxes. That’s what bootleggers went to jail for—not for making moonshine but for cheating the government out of tax revenues.

  “You know whose side I’m on in all this, don’t you?” Bob said once to Bryce.

  “When you’re with me, Murphy, you’re on the revenuers’ side. When you’re not with me, do as you please. Only remember, if I got to thinking you was making white lightning, I’d bust you fast as I would some old redneck out in the woods.”

  “All I drink is twelve-year-old Scotch,” Murphy said.

  They left the station wagon at the end of a trail through the woods and set out on foot. Bryce checked his .38 Smith & Wesson and Crockett patted a long-barreled .45 in his shoulder holster. Bob Murphy was unarmed, which Bryce always insisted on since he was present only as an observer. They plowed through endless woods, the thorny undergrowth tearing at their skins and the mosquitoes droning after them. Although it was full daylight by now, it was dark in some of the evergreen forest. Crockett was hoping the moonshiners would show and bring their car long, saving them a return walk back this way like they had yesterday. Murphy knew that Crockett, as the county man, got to seize whatever vehicle the moonshiners brought along. Because of all the stuff they would have to move in and out from the still, including the finished product, wherever the still was located would have to be accessible by some kind of track a truck or car could be driven over. Murphy knew that Bryce and Crockett were taking him along a cross-country back- entrance way that only a hog or a revenuer would think of using.

  When it seemed like they had been walking through the woods for hours and only occasionally emerging in a field or a clearing, Bryce turned to Bob and said, “Go easy from here on and no more talking.”

  Murphy nodded tolerantly. In spite of his height and bulk, he could ease across woodland without snapping a twig, which was more than he could say for his two companions. They came to a path, and Bryce pointed down at what looked like fresh tire marks on a damp patch. Bryce sniffed the air. There was no smell of wood smoke or mash cooking. He listened. There was no sound of men working. Then he plucked a tall fern and felt his way with it along the grassy path, a few paces ahead of the others. When he stopped, they did too. He jiggled the fern to show them the length of green thread it had picked up, almost invisible, stretched across the path a few inches above the ground. Murphy saw that the thread was tied at either end to saplings and was not set to release some diabolical weapon if broken, as it would have been in Nam. The three men stepped over the thread and left it unbroken behind them.

  In a small clearing at the end of the path, a steel drum lay on its side across two cinder blocks. Wood ash and some half-burned logs filled a pit beneath it. A pipe connected the steel drum to three wood barrels, which in turn served as cooker, doubler, and cooler. The cooler was filled with water, and a spiral of copper pipe, called the worm, ran through it. A pump head was installed in a well shaft the bootlegger had sunk.

  Bryce pointed to a neat pile of cut logs. “They brought these in since we were here yesterday.’ He ambled over to six oil drums standing upright, their tops covered with burlap held down by lengths of board. He lifted one burlap cover, ran his finger through the mash, and tasted it. “Ready to run,” he pronounced. “I reckon those boys are going to be along here today.”

  “Maybe they’re still recovering from last night and are a bit late in starting,” Crockett responded. “You want to wait?”

  “Do no harm. If they ain’t here in a couple of hours, they ain’t coming.”

  Bob Murphy had done enough walking and hoped the bootleggers would show so they wouldn’t have to trek back all the way through those woods again. Murphy dipped his finger into the dark clear liquid and tasted it. It was sour and tangy. Dust and dead insects floated on its top.

  “Sometimes you’ll find a rat or a coon drowned in it,” Bryce told him as he tasted the mash in the other five oil drums. “Two of these barrels are ready to run. The others are still sweet and sticky with scum on top—they’ll be a few days yet. It takes the mash longer while it’s still not too hot. In summer it could be ready i
n three days.” He carefully replaced the burlap and boards. “This stuff ain’t too bad, as white liquor goes in these parts. In each of these fifty-five-gallon drums there’s, say, fifty gallons of mash, which is probably about forty-five pounds of cornmeal, thirty pounds of sugar, two pounds of malt, and a one-pound cake of yeast. The rest is water. Depending on a lot of things, including the skill of the moonshiner, out of fifty gallons of mash he could get five to ten gallons of whiskey.”

  Crockett had been foraging around and came back with a pint bottle of clear liquid. “I found this hid in the bushes yonder.” He shook the bottle vigorously, and both he and Bryce looked closely at the bubbles on the surface. “About a hundred and ten proof, I’d say,” and Bryce nodded his agreement.

  For liquor of a hundred proof, the bubbles would sit exactly half in and half out of the liquid. For weaker liquor, the bubbles rode higher; for stronger liquor, lower.

  Bryce took the bottle and sniffed it. “Most white liquor comes in at a hundred proof, even if the bootlegger has to add rubbing alcohol or paint thinner to get it there. Another thing they add is beading oil, which makes the bead or bubble sit just right, like it was a hundred proof. Don’t seem like anything’s added to this stuff, though, not by the smell of it.”

  Murphy knew Bryce Cummings had not tasted liquor in many years, and he noticed that Crockett was not tasting it, either. So he took the bottle and swallowed a generous mouthful. He immediately felt the jolt of the fiery liquid.