The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “Why would we do a thing like that? You’ve served your purpose, and did a particularly good job of it, I might add. Now, we are going to have to tie you and you”—he pointed to the other man—“to this post here, but the cops will find you soon enough. And it’s a nice warm day—it’ll be good to get some air.”

  As one of the robbers escorted the wounded escapee back to the parked cars, the rest of the gang busily moved packages, bags, weapons, and gasoline cans from the Buick into the other car, a black Pontiac. They all wore gloves, which struck Darcy as odd, considering that none of their faces were masked.

  “So you’re the Firefly Brothers?” Darcy asked the ringleader. “That’s what they call you?”

  He looked at her appraisingly, as if surprised her voice wasn’t quivering. Perhaps he preferred quiverers? She didn’t think so.

  “They call us a lot of things. But we’ll take that one over some of the others.”

  She had heard of them. They were making some noise in the lesser parts of the Midwest, though not in her hometown of Chicago, where the Syndicate held something of a monopoly on crime—or perhaps only an oligopoly, now that Capone was in jail. The papers must not have run any photographs, though. Surely she wouldn’t have been able to blithely flip past a picture of this face.

  “So why am I not being tied up with them?” she asked him as two of the robbers began tying the other hostages’ wrists to the post of a collapsing fence.

  “We still need some company for a bit longer, if you don’t mind,” the ringleader told her. “But don’t worry, this time you can sit inside with us. Won’t be long.”

  “So do you have a name, or is it just Firefly Brother Number One?”

  “Better not let my brother hear you say that—he’ll take offense. My name’s Jason. And you are …?”

  “Darcy Windham.”

  “You aren’t related to—”

  “He’s my father.”

  “My, my. An automotive heiress.” He tipped his fedora. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not terribly close to my old man, so don’t ask me for any free cars.”

  “I’ve never had trouble finding free cars. You aren’t fond of your old man?”

  “Well, he did name an axle after me, but that’s about the extent of his familial affections.”

  Jason smiled. “It’s a form of immortality.”

  “Yes, a rather greasy one.”

  The other robbers had finished tying up the hostages, and Jason motioned for her to get into the backseat of the Pontiac.

  “You’re just going to leave this Buick out here to rot?”

  “Afraid so. The cops saw it, so the cops can have it.”

  “Why don’t you wear masks?”

  “I hope you aren’t calling me ugly.”

  “No,” and she found it impossible not to return his smile as he put a hand on her shoulder to guide her into the car. “But it does make it possible for your hostages to identify you later, doesn’t it?”

  The man who’d vomited screamed, “Jesus, lady, shut up!”

  “Hey, watch it, buddy!” Jason snapped. But when he turned back to Darcy he was smiling again. “It’s hot under a mask. Plus it’s hard to breathe. And who cares if people can identify me?”

  She still hadn’t quite gotten into the car. “You aren’t afraid of the police?”

  “Are you?”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Never? Then why do you have that gleam in your eye, Miss Windham?”

  More thunder, rattling her apartment’s windows. More gin, rattling her nerves. It was supposed to settle nerves, wasn’t it? Perhaps she’d had too much, or too little. Only one way to be sure.

  She hated herself as she poured. It had been years since she’d taken more than one drink in a sitting, not since emerging from the long fog precipitated by her mother’s “suicide.” Darcy preferred to think of it as a murder, even though there was no murder weapon for her father to leave his fingerprints on. Darcy had barely been in her teens, but her father hadn’t noticed her drinking for months—or maybe he’d noticed but hadn’t cared, at least not until the spectacle of herself became an embarrassment to him and his business. And then his solution had been to send her to a sanatorium—straitjackets and syringes and soft rooms.

  Her father had called her a few hours ago, to see if she’d heard the news. He sounded as if he were gloating. She didn’t know how he’d got her number—she had assumed this apartment was her secret. The man had tentacles; there was no limit to where they could slither. He’d asked what she was doing and she had said what does it sound like I’m doing, and he had told her martinis were a rather strong drink at this hour. What’s wrong with strength? she’d asked. Didn’t you preach the importance of strength, the necessity of strength, the primacy of strength? Sometimes a girl needs some strength in the morning.

  After hanging up on him, she’d left the apartment and walked down the stairs, clutching the banister with each step.

  It had stopped raining and the city glistened. Puddles like tiny mirrors lay on the roofs of parked cars. Every restaurant sign and arc light had been transformed into a leaky faucet. The city was so loud after a rainstorm, every movement shimmering with sound.

  How could she be in shock like this? Did she have that right, when all along she’d known his death was a possibility? Every time he’d walked into a bank it was possible. And lately, with so many people after them, it could have happened at any time—at a filling station, in the bathroom of a supposedly safe apartment, driving down the street in a small town, buying coffee and the paper. Hiding in a farmhouse in Points North, Indiana. Why Points North? What on earth had happened these past few days? She knew something didn’t make sense, but she lacked the energy to overturn these rocks and peer beneath them. All that mattered was she had been buried. He was gone. And the world was crying around her.

  She walked down the street, weaving, and realized it was later than she had thought. She could smell the lake, smell it receding. Everything was pulling away from her. She’d probably never even see Ronny again, not that that was such a terrible fate. But suddenly Darcy missed her, wanted desperately to share this with someone, wanted to talk to her about Jason and Whit, breathe the brothers back to life with their stories. They could not possibly be dead.

  Jason Fireson dead? Someone with such vibrancy, someone whose simple glance contained more energy than all the working stiffs trudging to work on the train each morning? Life was three-dimensional with him, the flatness of the mundane popped up into startling clarity, so many roads to navigate and mountains to climb. That’s what it was like with Jason; he made everything possible. Except death. That was unimaginable.

  The photographs, Jesus. How could they print photos like that? Gratuitous. The swine. Reveling in it. Was that all he was to them? All those people who had gladly hidden the brothers in their crumbling homes, lied to the police for them, sung their praises in taverns and factories. Now they were chuckling at the thought of a bunch of country officers stalking them in the night and—

  A car rushed past, turning a puddle into a weapon. She was soaked from the waist down. She hollered after it, pedestrians staring at this very unladylike wraith, this banshee of madness. Goddamn you! Goddamn you all!

  And now a police officer, Jesus, asking her to calm down. Sir, you insult me. I am calm. This is calmness. Wrath is calm. God, she could have slapped him, but that would have been a mistake. At least her father hadn’t shared her address with any reporters; at least there were no flashbulbs recording her dazed movements. Darcy loathed pity, but she found herself telling this beat cop, this fresh-faced rookie, that her husband had been killed last night. He told her he was sorry and took her by the arm to walk her back to her building. He asked if she had reported the crime and she said, yes, yes, it’s being looked into, that’s not the point. Jesus, she’d told a stranger, and he was helping her to walk straight, or close
enough. She was crying on his shoulder, on his uniform, already wet from the rain, so maybe he didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure how long he let her do that, but it must have been a while, because when they finally reached her building again and he tipped his hat to her she felt spent. Dry.

  Where was she supposed to go?

  They had blindfolded her for the next portion of their getaway, squeezing her between two silent men in the backseat. She instantly regretted that comment about being able to identify them.

  “This is hardly the way to treat a lady,” she said, hoping her strong words could compensate for her increasing alarm. A final door was shut, the engine was turned on, and they were rolling away. Where, and for how long? Maybe he hadn’t been flirting; maybe he had less chivalrous ends in mind.

  “Let’s just say there are parts of this drive that we prefer to be secretive, and leave it at that.” Jason’s voice sounded the slightest bit different—not cold, exactly, but businesslike. She was a commodity, something to be held and then traded. She had felt this way before.

  The men didn’t talk anymore, so neither did she. She missed the exhilaration of the running boards, the wind in her hair. Already she was amazed she had felt that way—God, she was crazy. She was being kidnapped by gangsters and she had foolishly smiled her way into the executioner’s den. The freed hostages were likely offering her description to the police even now. Somewhere an obituary was being prepared.

  They drove for an hour, maybe two, stopping intermittently. A door would open and one of the shoulders beside her would depart. At least she had some room back here now.

  “I’ll have to ask you to lie down now, Miss Windham,” Jason said after the second stop. “Wouldn’t want any passersby to see your blindfold and get suspicious.”

  She obeyed, reluctantly. She began to wonder if she would ever see anything else again.

  “So how much money did we make today?” she asked them, again hoping her own words could lighten her mood. Even when she had nothing else, like in the sanatorium, she always had herself, always had her words. She used them to calm herself, reinvent herself.

  “Can’t say yet—haven’t had the opportunity to count it.”

  “Well, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine this was a pretty good day. What does that translate to in this line of work? Ten thousand? Forty thousand?”

  “That’d be nice” was all he said, but she heard a second voice grumble, “I’ll bet that’s a typical day for her daddy.”

  Minutes later the car stopped again, though the engine was still running.

  “All righty, Miss Windham, this is your stop,” Jason said as two doors opened. She sat up, and then another door was opened, and she felt a hand on hers. He gentlemanly guided her out of the car, then she felt him untying the blindfold.

  Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the sun, and to him standing so close. She backed up despite herself, wishing she hadn’t.

  She was in a small field that looked as if it had once been a farm but had been lost to neglect. To her right was an abandoned farmhouse and a narrow pathway they had driven through. Surely this drab locale would not be her final resting place.

  “Sorry to leave you here, but this is where the adventure ends. Once we’ve driven off, you can start knocking on doors and I’m sure someone will have a phone.”

  She let herself exhale. All would be well, as she had originally believed. These weren’t such bad men, especially this one right here. After the period of enforced blindness, her nascent vision was fuzzy around the edges but just sharp enough in the center for her to appreciate his face. She hadn’t been imagining it before—he really was this handsome.

  “What a pity,” she said. “I was rather enjoying myself. For a moment, I thought the famous bank robber was moving into kidnapping.”

  “Not my style.”

  “Why is that? Not dramatic enough? Not enough witnesses for your vanity?”

  “Takes too long. Ransom notes, waiting for them to rustle up the money, phone calls …”

  “You prefer immediate gratification.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Perhaps you need to learn the benefits of patience.”

  “I suppose you know of a good teacher?”

  “Hate to interrupt, brother,” the other one said, his voice the very sound of rolling eyes. “But we’re running late.”

  Jason was still smiling at her. He had started and never stopped. He tipped his hat.

  “Been a pleasure, Miss Windham. You take care.”

  Twin door slams like gunshots, and the Pontiac was pulling away. She was alone now, on an abandoned farm, in an abandoned town, in some abandoned state, in the center of an abandoned country. They could have dropped her off in downtown Chicago and she would have felt the same way. After being in that man’s presence, anything afterward was emptiness.

  IV.

  It was dark when the Firefly Brothers crept through their mother’s backyard again.

  They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked, scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of sight.

  They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough, and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.

  No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.

  It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival, though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:

  PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

  Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only when they were alone.

  The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace, or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be easier to procure funds on their own.

  It felt so strange to be wearing Pop’s old clothes. Whit had gone so far as to name his son after Pop, but to Jason the subject of their father was one best left unmentioned. Yet here were these borrowed clothes, practically screaming at him.

  Pop hadn’t been a screamer, but he’d certainly been a preacher. All those endless sayings about the benefits of hard work, early birds getting worms, stitches in time saving nine, so hokey Jason winced to remember them. Patrick Fireson had read countless Horatio Alger novels as a young man and continued to reread them as an adult. They were stories of poor boys who worked through poverty and whose good deeds and work ethic attracted the favor of kindly rich men, who helped them up the ladder. Pop had given copies of the books to his sons, but Jason had found them deathly boring and corny; he’d been more a Huck Finn kind of boy.

  But those books had rung true for Pop, who liked to joke that he himself was a character from an Alger novel brought to life. His parents had died in a fire when he was five, and his distant relatives weren’t in a position to help. Pop was sent to a Catholic orphanage, and at the age of twelve he started as a clerk in a small grocery. He toiled there for many years, gradually gaining the good graces of the owner, a thrifty German named Schmidt. Pictures of the young, hardworking Patrick Fireson show a thin lad who al
ways seems to have stopped in the middle of some activity—his hair mussed, his collar loose, his eyes impatient for the camera’s shutter. Pop served in the Great War, returning to the store after nine months with some shrapnel in his right knee but his can-do attitude undiminished. Schmidt’s adult son died of pneumonia in the winter of ’24, and two years later Pop received an unexpected inheritance from an army buddy. By then Schmidt was tired of the store and the memories they held of his doomed legacy. Pop made him an offer, and the store was his.

  “I didn’t have parents,” Pop would say. “My father was a broom and my mother was a mop, and they taught me all I needed to know.” Maybe if Pop had grown up in a real family he would have had a better idea of how to be a father, Jason sometimes thought, instead of simply browbeating his sons with lessons about elbow grease and honesty.

  By the time Jason was in high school, Pop was a ranking member of the Boosters Club, meeting with the other local businessmen to trumpet their own virtues and draft plans for the future of their city. Despite his Irish roots, he was an outspoken proponent of Prohibition—“Booze makes young people lazy,” he warned his sons—and later an opponent of speakeasies, even if he himself indulged at home with the occasional glass of whiskey or scotch. He wrote letters to the editor deploring the prevalence of truants running about downtown (and pilfering from his shelves), and he happily gave money to candidates for city council who supported business (and who, unbeknownst to him, would soon become very good friends indeed with the supermarket owners who were eyeing expansion into Lincoln City).

  The family store may have been what brought the Firesons out of their cramped apartment and into a modest house in a tree-lined neighborhood, but it had never interested Jason as a career. He’d always thought of it as punishment. Stacking crates, unpacking boxes, filling the shelves, taking inventory, enduring his father’s constant criticism and moralizing—Jason did all these things, from a young age, just as he raked leaves or washed the family car. But he sure didn’t plan on being a professional leaf raker as an adult, so why should he work at the store, either? Let his brothers take over. Whit in particular seemed the natural choice; Pop was different with him, funny and carefree. Whenever Pop imparted advice to his youngest—telling him, for example, that most men were lazy and that the hardworking man had an instant advantage over his competitors— young Whit would listen with a look of awe in his eyes, as if it was an honor to receive such guidance.