Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “The notes, Mr. Davidson. Just review the notes,” said O’Brien.

  Slim Jim returned to the readout for what felt like the hundredth time. He’d heard about some big-time grifters who worked like this. Getting so far inside the heads of their marks that they knew what was going on in there before the chumps realized it themselves. He could sort of see the point.

  O’Brien had helped him close some amazing deals these last few months. But damn, it was hard work. Nevertheless, he plowed on, reciting most of the notes from memory even though the words still hung there in front of him.

  “Gladys drinks in private. She finds her comfort in the church. Her first love was dance, her second music. But she’s kind of a fat bitch now so . . . Sorry! Sorry . . . She gets around in bare feet and old socks so her kid can have shoes. Elvis, he’s aware of his family’s low standing. It eats him up and he wants to rescue them. It always tickles him when his mama says she’s proud of him.”

  In spite of himself, Slim Jim couldn’t help but warm to the little prick. They’d listened to his music all the way down here, and you had to admit, the kid had a gift. Or would have.

  Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. If Slim Jim bought him a ticket out of Tupelo now, gave him enough money for a comfortable life, maybe the kid would never sing a song worth a tinker’s crap. Not that the thought really bothered him. Those songs were recorded by an Elvis from another time. No, this was all about who was gonna get paid for them.

  Not some asshole called Colonel Tom Parker, you could bet on that.

  Nope. “Slim Jim Enterprises” would be latching itself on to this particular money tit. And if the kid never became an actual recording star, just because he grew up rich instead of poor, well, who gave a damn? Slim Jim had grown up in a town a lot like this, with a daddy a lot like Vernon. And if some asshole had turned up on their doorstep, offering to buy them out of poverty, Daddy would have been trampled to death by the entire Davidson clan rushing to sign on the dotted line. And to hell with the consequences.

  Slim Jim was only vaguely aware of the deepening dusk as he sat in the Caddy, chanting his way through O’Brien’s notes like some kind of mad priest. Yeah, Tupelo is a lot like home. Besides the two main roads in the center of town, every street was a strip of dirt or gravel. Clouds of dust would rise from them in summer. They’d turn into rivers of mud during the spring rains. Most folks would have worked the Roosevelt program during the Depression, cutting brush, fixing roads. Most, like Gladys Presley, wouldn’t ask for handouts, but would accept what was offered. The men would all be factory workers and sharecroppers.

  Now most of them would be in the army or working in the war industries. Poor but honest, they’d think of themselves. Screwed and stupid was how Slim Jim would have put it.

  A guy like Vernon Presley he could understand. He knew the type. He’d have had good intentions, but not enough character to see them through. Slim Jim wished they could deal with Vernon rather than Gladys. It was a laydown that they could sneak a signature out of old Vern, just for a crate of beer and a hundred bucks.

  But O’Brien had been a real ballbreaker on that particular subject, even more so than usual. There’d be no grifting the Presley family. They’d get the industry standard percentage, and Slim Jim would take the industry standard cut. It was a shitload of money to be tossing away to a bunch of dumbass crackers, at least to his way of thinking. But she’d given him that stone face of hers again, and he’d buckled. She was a scary bitch—and bottom line, he was rich because of it.

  “And then Vernon told Elvis he was responsible for his mama’s ill health because of the bad birth . . . ,” he continued, only half his mind on the task.

  “No,” O’Brien said. “We don’t know for sure that that’s happened yet, so it’s better not to bring it up. But it’s supposed to happen around about now, so just keep it in mind.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “So are we gonna fuck this puppy or what?”

  His lawyer rolled her eyes, but she leaned forward to tap on the glass partition that separated them from the driver.

  “Okay,” she said, raising her voice. “Let’s roll.”

  It was a short drive from Priceville Cemetery to East Tupelo, a pissant little rats’ nest of meandering unpaved streets running down off the Old Saltillo Road. A couple of creeks, two sets of railroad tracks, some open fields, and a whole world of dreams separated the hamlet’s beaten-down inhabitants from the good people of Tupelo proper. Slim Jim wasn’t bothered none driving into such a place.

  Nor, he noticed, was Ms. O’Brien. He figured it was just another one of those things about your dames from the future. Not much seemed to rattle them, unless you tried to cop a feel without being invited.

  “That’s it,” she announced.

  She indicated a small wooden frame house, a “shotgun shack,” they called them. This one stood about a hundred yards up the street they’d just entered. Dusk was full upon them now, and the car’s headlights lanced through the gloom and the dust and pollen that always seemed to hang in the air, even at this time of year.

  “You sure you don’t want to do the talking?” he asked, suddenly nervous for no good reason. That wasn’t like him at all.

  “You’ll be fine,” O’Brien assured him. “It’s just business. Be sure and treat them with respect.”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts. You’ll nail it. I’ve never known such a rolled gold bullshit artist. If you’d been born any luckier, you could have been a senator or a televangelist.”

  Slim Jim wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she didn’t seem to mean it as a compliment.

  His driver pulled over into the gutter. As soon as he stepped out, the smell took him by the throat. Sour sweat. Outdoor toilets. Woodsmoke. Corn bread, grits, and boiled spuds. The smell of his childhood.

  He could tell, without needing to check, that dozens of pairs of eyes had settled on the back of his newly cut, lightweight suit. Some of the bolder folks would have wandered right out onto their verandas—an awful fancy name for a thin porch made of raw pine boards, roofed in by scraps of tin, and supported at each corner by sawed-off bits of two-by-four. Others would be hiding in their front rooms, twitching aside sun-faded curtains, if they had any, peering out suspiciously at the Presleys’ unexplained visitors.

  And if they thought he was something, he wondered what sort of ripple went up and down when Ms. O’Brien emerged from the car. East Tupelo wasn’t used to women like that, not yet. Hell, neither was the rest of America. That skirt of hers would surely send tongues wagging, showing off so much leg above the knee as it did.

  But it was time to get into character, so he pasted a harmless, well-meaning expression on his dial. A neutral grin that said to the world he was hoping he’d found the right address.

  Slim Jim took in the details of the kid’s house in one quick glance. Again, he didn’t need to stare. It was all old news to him. There’d be only two rooms running off one corridor. You could shoot a gun clean through without hitting anything, hence the name. The kid would probably sleep where Slim Jim himself had for years, on an old sofa in the front room—which did double duty as a kitchen, and a parlor when guests came a-calling. Every stick of furniture would be someone else’s cast-offs, but it’d most likely be clean. Gladys would make sure of that.

  The water would be pumped by hand, from a well out in the backyard. There’d be bare boards on the floor and walls. No little comforts or luxuries. Not a blade of grass grew in the brown dirt that substituted for a front yard. Even in the gloom, he recognized the scratch marks of a homemade dogwood broom in the hard-packed earth, and the telltale prints of chicken feet. He bit down on a sigh. It was going to be like a goddamned oven in there.

  He really missed his brownstone.

  2

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  He’d expected some changes. Even so, after an hour or more in Los Angeles, Chief Petty Officer Eddie Mohr felt like his head had been turned insi
de out. Sort of like an old sock.

  He felt awkward as hell in his new “twenty-first” uniform. Figured people woulda been staring and pointing at him like he was some sort of carnival freak as he walked through the train station. But it was Mohr himself who had to resist the urge to stop and gawk, while nobody else gave him as much as a second glance. Most didn’t even notice him the first time around.

  He’d stood on the concourse at Union Station for a long time, ever since he’d painfully uncurled himself from one of the hard, cheap seats on the Super Chief. The station was roaring with foot traffic. Sailors from what they were calling the Old Navy lounged around in their best whites, clearly in no rush to get away to the South Pacific. Hundreds of civilians swarmed over the bright mosaic floor, too, their shoes clicking and scuffing on the tiles. Many of them were of fighting age, but none seemed to be bothered that somebody might front them about why they hadn’t signed up yet. Or been drafted.

  Mohr wandered through, hauling the dead weight of his duffel bag as if it were a side of beef. Occasionally he’d spot a uniform like his own, the coloring slightly different from the local rig, the cut a little more stylish. At least that’s how some fairy from New York called it.

  His old man had read that article from the Post out loud, howling with laughter, tears streaming down his face. “Lookit this, Ethel,” he’d yelled out to the kitchen. “Lughead here’s standin’ at d’ cuttin’ edge a fashion.”

  Maybe that’s why Mohr was rolling and twitching his shoulders so much inside the new uniform. To steady his balance. Meanwhile, he did his best to avoid catching the eye of anybody else who looked to be headed out to the Zone, to the raw, sprawling settlements and industrial “parks,” as they called them. Not a one of them looked much like a fucking park to Eddie Mohr, though. Just a bunch of big sheds and warehouses with a few scraggly fucking eucalyptus trees for shade. Some of them, they didn’t even seem to have workers inside. It was like the machines ran themselves.

  He scowled then, and remembered Midway. Machines running themselves—that’s what had caused the whole class-A fuckup to begin with. That’s why he never went out near the factories if he could avoid it.

  He’d seen that movie, the one with the muscle man in it. A kraut, and he’d been the goddamned governor of California, if you could believe it! In the movie, the machines had tried to take over the world. He felt like it was about two minutes from happening whenever he set foot in some of them factories out in the Valley.

  Somebody bumped into him then, knocking the duffel bag off his shoulders. “Sorry, mac,” the guy called out as he hurried away, not even bothering to turn around.

  Some long-haired gimp. Mohr snorted in disgust. Probably wearing an earring, too.

  He found himself standing in front of the station’s Harvey House restaurant. It was full of officers and their dates. Freshly minted war brides some of them, to judge by the painfully happy smiles and that just-been-fucked glow about the cheeks. And a fair swag of gold diggers, too, if his suspicions played true. They were probably dizzy with the prospect of the ten-grand GI’s insurance they’d pocket if their “dearly beloved” got himself shot to pieces along with old Dugout Doug.

  Mohr’s whole body ached with fatigue, and his fractured skull—or at least the cracks they’d fixed up with some sort of plastic cement—throbbed in a dull, far-off kind of way.

  His train had left Chicago early, and he’d rested only fitfully on the long haul across the continent. He thought about grabbing a sit-down sandwich or a burger at Harvey’s. He could see they ran a desegregated joint—a lot of places in California seemed to these days. There were a couple of uniformed Negroes and some Chinese-looking fellas eating in there. Even had some white folk with them. But he thought he could still detect a sort of no-go area around them. The place was packed, but a few empty chairs seemed to be scattered around their table. Still, they were being served, and left in peace.

  That wouldn’t have happened six months ago.

  He propped himself on the arm of a big leather chair for a moment. If he weren’t so tired, he would have marveled at the thing. It was a much flashier piece of furniture than had ever graced the Mohr family home, and here it was stuck in a goddamn train station. Somebody had left behind a crumpled copy of the L.A. Times, and he flicked through it idly while he waited for the bus out to Fifty-one.

  Bad move.

  Right there on the second fucking page was a picture of that fucking idiot Slim Jim Davidson, grinning up a storm!

  He had some poor kid tucked under one arm and some flint-eyed dame who just had to be twenty-first lurking at his shoulder. In his other hand, he was waving around a giant cardboard check written out for twenty thousand dollars.

  Mohr felt a wave of acid rise in his gut, and he hadn’t even gone for the burger yet. He tried not to read the story, but he couldn’t help himself. Davidson had bought himself another singer, name a’ Presley, and a whole bunch of this kid’s tunes were gonna be released over the next six months. Mohr snorted when he read that a “significant” percentage of the profits was being channeled straight into a war-bond drive. It’d be one tenth of 1 percent of fuck all compared with the bribes that little weasel had paid out to get himself taken off active duty and assigned to “special services” with the USO. Mohr bitterly regretted not hammering Davidson flat when he’d had the chance back on their ship.

  On the Astoria, he’d had the little crook under his thumb; now he was just like everyone else—reduced to following the adventures of Slim Jim in the papers and the newsreels. Mostly that involved watching him getting richer and richer. But Davidson was a sneaky little shit, and it seemed every time he fell ass-backwards into a pile of someone else’s money, he made sure to donate a big whack of it to some war widow or an orphaned kid, or some dogface with his dick shot off. So now everybody loved Slim Jim Davidson. Walter fucking Winchell wouldn’t shut up about the jerk.

  Mohr felt a twinge of sympathy for the Presley kid, though. He looked like some poor dumb rube who’d gone to bed on a dirt floor and woken up in the Ritz. He wanted to warn the boy not to hold on to that check too tightly, or one day he’d find Davidson had chewed his arm down to a bloody stump trying to get the thing back.

  He angrily reefed the page over and tried to lose himself in some other, less aggravating news. He half read some piece about a delegation from the NAACP and the Congress of Industrial Organizations visiting Kolhammer. His old man would have been interested in that. He still kept up with the union news. Next, Mohr skimmed a report out of London about all the invasion fears, and he was actually getting interested in a bit on some guy called McCarthy who would’ve been some kind of heavy-hitting senator one day, ’cept that he got himself killed by the Japs down in Australia.

  Then he heard the police whistle.

  The roar of the crowd died away to a buzz, and he could suddenly hear music coming from somewhere nearby. A twenty-first number, for sure—a duet about this dame called Candy. It sounded like it was being sung by some drunk on laudanum and a Texas bar whore.

  Then everyone turned, the way a crowd will. Mohr turned with them and heard the whistle again. He got a quick flash of a dark-skinned figure in a uniform like his—

  Ah, shit.

  —being tackled by two guys who looked like LAPD, until he moved a little closer to discover they worked for the Union Pacific line. They were older than your average beat cop. And fatter. But by God, they could swing a nightstick just as quickly.

  Mohr cursed under his breath at the sound of polished hickory smacking into flesh. He’d once stood on a picket line with his old man when it had been broken up by private muscle using ax handles and brass knucks. The sound of the nightsticks took him back there, and he started to trot. Nobody else within thirty yards of the assault was moving. A few women gasped and turned their faces away—they wouldn’t have been from the Task Force, then. A few of the men looked on meekly. Some green kids in army uniforms, who’d been so full of th
emselves just a minute earlier, looked queasy now. A couple of sailors snickered and pointed.

  Mohr glared at them as he picked up speed.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” he roared in his fiercest gun-deck voice.

  The guy they were hitting, a young kid, a greaser of some sort by the look of him, actually flinched as much under the lash of the chief’s voice as he had under the rain of blows. He was a Mexican, in what had been a new Auxilliary Forces uniform, until it got all torn up and bloodied.

  “None of your business, salty,” snarled one of the railroad cops. He had his billy club raised for another blow, and he suddenly seemed to become aware of it hanging up there. Mohr could tell that for a split second he thought about whipping it down one last time, but a cold, fixed stare stayed his hand. The man lowered the weapon uncertainly.

  A spell was broken. The tableau on the station concourse began to move again as a furious buzz of conversation started up and spiraled out and away from the confrontation. The kid, a newly minted private, still lay where he’d been taken down. Violent shudders ran through his body as he struggled to choke off sobs and whimpers that wanted to turn into full-blown howling. Mohr willed the kid to keep it together as he bent down under the hostile eyes of the UP cops and gripped him by the arm.

  “Suck it up, kid,” he whispered fiercely. “Get on your feet, and cut out the sniveling.”

  “What do you think you’re doing? He’s coming with us.”

  Mohr turned to confront the guy. His partner hadn’t spoken, and to judge by how he was shrinking away, Mohr didn’t think he would now. “What makes you think he’s going anywhere with you?”

  “He’s a thief,” came the retort. “We got a report that he stole a pair of sunglasses.”

  The tendons all along Mohr’s jawline stood out as he ground his teeth together. “You—got—a report?”