Red Highway

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Go ahead,” said Virgil testily. “I’ll be along later.”

  Alex yawned. “I’m about ready for it myself.” He stretched. “How about Annie? She go to bed?”

  Hazel shook her head. “No, she fell asleep on the couch. With that movie magazine on her lap. She’s been reading that dumb thing over and over again since you got it for her.”

  “Well, as long as it gives her something to do,” Alex said sleepily.

  “And that’s another thing. She hasn’t lifted a finger to help with anything since we got here. Alex, she’s driving me up the wall.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  Hazel sighed shortly, dismissing the subject. “What are you two talking about?” She looked from Alex to Virgil. Virgil’s eyes flickered to the map of Shawnee for an instant, then shot back to his wife. Too late. She stared at the map. “I see,” she said quietly.

  “Hazel, it’s not what you think.”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  Virgil leaned forward, encircling the map with his long arms. “This bank is the key to a fresh start. We can pick up and take off, leave the cops with egg on their big fat faces. Would you like that?”

  “You mean Mexico, don’t you? I heard you talking about it when I came in.”

  “That’s it. Mexico. No more Public Enemy Number One. No more Tri-State Terror. Just Mr. and Mrs. Warren Henry, from Oklahoma.”

  “And twenty thousand dollars,” added Alex.

  “Why Mexico?” Hazel asked. “Why not here?”

  Virgil went limp in his chair. He put his cigarette between his lips and dragged deeply on it, then let the smoke curl out his nostrils. “Have you read a newspaper lately?”

  Hazel closed her eyes and nodded. “I understand.”

  “So we’ll crack this one bank and skip. They tell me the border’s a cinch. The guards are out looking for wetbacks coming in, not tourists heading out. Public Enemy Number One don’t mean a thing to them. We’re as good as clear right now.”

  They stared at each other a long time, neither of them moving or saying a word. Finally, a loud comic yawn shattered the silence and Alex got to his feet. “You two can keep sizing each other up like a snake and a mongoose, for all I care. Me for bed.”

  He went out and closed the door behind him, separating himself from the silent tableau within.

  Twenty-six miles away, the three-car convoy hurtled and bounced along the rain-scarred road leading to Shawnee, transmissions whining dangerously. The face of the federal agent behind the wheel of the first vehicle, bathed in the eerie green glow of the dashboard lights, was tense and knotted, his eyes like slits in a Halloween mask. Farnum’s cigarette glowed calmly through the darkness in the back seat.

  “What about it, Chief?” someone asked. “Is this guy Ballard as tough as the papers make him out to be?”

  The red glow flew to Farnum’s invisible lips, brightened, then withdrew as a pall of smoke was discharged into the blackness. “He’s been in business eleven years. That’s tough enough, I guess.”

  “I guess it really doesn’t matter, with fifteen men on our side.” The voice was the driver’s.

  “That depends on how many Ballard has with him.”

  “The landlord says there are at least two women in that house,” said the first man. The barrel of his machine gun glinted as he shifted it to his other knee. “What’s the procedure with them?”

  “They’ll be given a chance to surrender.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  There was no answer. Farnum stirred in his seat to look out the back window. His features were thrown into brief relief as the headlights of the following car fell on his face, then faded again when he turned back. “I hope that hick sheriff knows enough to keep his boys in line,” he said. “I don’t trust that guy.”

  The convoy roared on.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was 2:00 A.M. when the first car coasted to a stop three blocks from the two-story house on the edge of Shawnee. The brakes creaked. The headlights died. Behind it, the second car halted, then the third. The hissing of the rain became the only sound.

  A door snicked and opened, then another and another. Guns rattled. Shoes scraped on concrete. A red glow arched through the air, came to a rest on the wet pavement, and vanished. Farnum expelled the last of his cigarette smoke. “The house is there, on the corner.” He pointed, but no one could see where he was pointing. It didn’t matter, because they knew he would lead them to it. “All right, let’s go.” They followed him in bulk.

  The curtains were open on a ground floor window, a light showing through it. When they got close enough to make out the figure that was moving around within, Farnum put out a hand and stopped them.

  “Jesus, it’s him,” someone whispered.

  “Shhhh!” Farnum’s warning came like a pistol shot. “Where’s the sheriff?”

  “Here!” Sheriff McCracken pushed his way through to the front.

  “Sheriff, take your men and go around the rear. We’ll take up the front. When you hear gunfire, charge in shooting.”

  The sheriff grunted.

  The body of men split up, the uniformed deputies slogging through the drenched lawns that led toward the other side of the house on the corner. When it was silent, the federal agents move in on the lighted window.

  A big spotted dog leapt up, his chain rattling, and began barking.

  “That damned dog!” whispered the man at Farnum’s side.

  “That damned dog!” growled Virgil. He was standing near the window in his undershirt and trousers, a shoe in his hand. Hazel, who had finally managed to doze off in the bed, came awake, not because of the dog, but because of Virgil’s oath. The cylindrical black oil heater in the center of the floor glowed cheerily, its yellow flame projecting a single big flower pattern through the ventilated top onto the ceiling. Virgil’s converted Lugers lay peacefully on the table in front of the window.

  “He’ll quiet down after a while,” Hazel said sleepily. “He just wants in.”

  “It’s the neighbors I’m worried about. All we need’s a call to the cops to tip over the bandwagon.” He threw the shoe to the floor with a thud and bent to untie the other one.

  The window burst where his head had been and something thunkered into the wall opposite. Virgil hit the floor. Hazel screamed.

  “This is the law!” bellowed a voice from outside. “Put your hands up, Ballard. And don’t reach for those guns!”

  Virgil hesitated only a second. He sprang to his feet and grasped the two Lugers, firing them even before they had cleared the table. The window fell apart before the onslaught.

  The blackness in the yard was shattered in a dozen places as yellow streaks of fire erupted from the trees and bushes.

  “Down! Get under the bed!” Virgil, flattened against the wall beside the splintered window frame, shouted at Hazel. She slammed to the floor in a tangle of bedsheets and rolled beneath the big fourposter. Lead was whumping into the back wall in big handfuls, loosing a shower of plaster onto the floor with each impact.

  A .45 slug blasted through the front wall and clipped Virgil in his bare right shoulder. He spun past the window and collapsed on one knee, blood streaming from the wound.

  “Virgil!” screamed Hazel, struggling to get out from under the bed.

  “Stay back!” he grunted and shuffled around to the other side of the window. The wooden floor was spattered red.

  “We got him!” A youthful federal agent began moving forward.

  “Get back there!” spat Farnum. “He’s not dead yet.” The last part of his statement was lost in the din of fresh fire from the bedroom. “What’d I tell you?” said the chief, and leveled a blast with his machine gun across the shattered sill.

  A second-story window on the other end of the house was wrenched upward and a machine gun began hammering from the blackened aperture. Farnum shouted and pointed in that direction. Some of the agents swung their fire to the upper par
t of the house, but not before Sheriff McCracken’s deputies had opened up with their shotguns, slamming loads of buckshot into the whitewashed boards. Lights began to blink on in windows all up and down the residential street.

  Virgil was clearing a jam in one of his Lugers when he heard the deep rattle of Alex Kern’s machine gun start up on the southwest side of the house. He grinned and smacked the end of the big clip with the heel of his hand. “Good old Alex.”

  The room was in darkness now, Hazel having doused the bedside lamp at Virgil’s command. Only the glowing design thrown across the ceiling by the oil heater remained, to cast an unreal magic-lantern effect over the whole scene of destruction.

  “Virgil? Virgil, are you all right?” Hazel’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  The robber heaved and grunted with the effort of readjusting the magazine. At last he panted triumphantly, and, leveling the pistol with both hands, sent a new burst into the yard. “Me and Alex, we’ll take ’em.”

  In the bedroom on the second story, Alex was standing square in the window, describing a broad to-and-fro arc with his Thompson across the stretch of grass between their house and the one next door. His spent cartridges plinked to the floor in a steady chorus of bouncing brass. Return fire flashed in the darkness below like strings of exploding Christmas tree lights. Only six more shopping days till Christmas, he thought wryly as he sent a sustained burst in the direction of the street.

  Annabelle, squeezed close to the wall in her bedcovers, screamed loud and long, stopping at intervals only long enough to take a breath. Her movie magazine lay in tatters on the floor, where it had landed after having been shot off the night table by a lawman’s errant bullet. Her husband, enveloped in darkness and clinging gunsmoke, looked more to her like a demon released from the hell her family deacon used to preach about than the personable young rake she had married. She felt she was on the wrong side.

  “Damn place is like a fortress.” Farnum dropped his submachine gun to knee-level in order to bring the circulation back into his arms, then raised it again and blasted at Ballard’s bedroom window. Beneath and through the din of battle, the big pointer remained standing at the end of his chain, barking and yelping at the team of invaders. The special agent cursed him between bursts.

  “Where are those men with the gas?” He screamed the question into the ear of the man nearest him.

  “’Round the corner, with the rest of the hicks,” was the reply.

  “Get ’em.”

  The subordinate scrambled to his feet and went running off in that direction, crouching beneath the crossfire.

  Except for the two who had joined the sheriff’s deputies for the assault on the second story, and the one Farnum had sent off to get the tear gas, all the federal men were firing into the bedroom of the Tri-State Terror. What the hell’s holding him up? thought Farnum as he blasted away, feeling the heat of the machine gun’s barrel through the wooden forward grip.

  The agent returned with one of the deputies, who held a short, wire-barreled shotgunlike weapon cradled in his big hands. They huddled around the chief.

  Farnum pointed at the bullet-smashed window. “Lob a canister through there and run like hell.”

  The man grunted, leveled the wire barrel at the window, and squeezed the trigger. Pom! Something big erupted from the muzzle and went sailing over the sill into the shadowy chamber. The two agents and the deputy straightened and leaped backward just as fresh fire opened up from one of the converted Lugers. When they stopped running at the edge of the yard, volumes of yellowish smoke came billowing out through the window, curling and expanding as it overflowed the dimensions of the bedroom. Someone was coughing at the center of the cloud.

  Farnum stood back facing the front door just yards from the infernal smoke and motioned his men to spread out. “Get ready,” he snapped.

  Alex heard the strange whumping noise from around the corner and wondered what it was. He could still detect the rapid brrrp of Virgil’s pistols, so he decided that everything was all right in that direction. As for himself, he was doing all right, since most of the men below were armed only with shotguns, and by the time their fire reached his level, the pellets had spread out so that they weren’t too much of a threat.

  He had caught a tiny bit of lead in his right forearm, but it was little more than a bee sting to him as he concentrated upon keeping the deputies back beyond effective shotgun range. Now and then a federal man got in a good burst with a Thompson which was lethal enough at any range, but, since it was almost impossible to aim a machine gun beyond the space of a few yards, Alex felt pretty safe. The window, which he had shoved upward to begin the battle, hadn’t even been broken. Now if only Annabelle would stop screaming, he could maybe lay down a good enough pattern of fire to back off the lawmen long enough for him to escape.

  He whirled and snapped his wife a furious glance through the enveloping darkness. “Shut up, damn it! How do you expect me to concentrate if—” He was just turning back to rejoin the battle when a bucketload of .45-caliber lead slammed into his chest. He screamed, staggered backward, wavered on unsteady legs, and pitched forward out through the window. His body did a single somersault in the air and splatted facedown on the wet grass. His machine gun came down afterward, bouncing twice against the wall before it landed clattering in the paved driveway. Annabelle stopped screaming as if someone had flipped a switch.

  The gray steel tear-gas canister zinged through the window as Virgil was reloading one of his pistols. It hit the floor and bounded end over end, leading a spiral of yellow smoke from a fissure in its top. The room was hazy with the gas by the time Virgil dived after the offending object, seeking to sling it back outside. He scrabbled around on his hands and knees, groping for it, his eyes stinging, his throat threatening to turn itself inside out. The wound in his arm throbbed painfully as new blood washed over the sticky fluid that had dried over his right side. He began coughing horribly and staggered to his feet, grasping his reloaded gun from the smoke-enshrouded floor. “We got to clear out!” he choked, groping for the door.

  The space between the bed and the floor was airless, an almost tangible slab of smoke crammed into it. Hazel had crawled out and was blindly attempting to stand up. It wasn’t easy. Her face and eyes burned and the moist parts of her body were aflame, the panic born of pain making her slip and slide, driving splinters deep into her bare hands and feet from the plank floor. She heard the doorknob rattle, felt the rush of fresh air invade the room, and dragged herself laboriously to her feet, calling unintelligibly into the thickening fog. “Virgil! Where are you? Are you here? Virgil?” She clawed the empty air.

  The fresh air in the hallway was delicious. Virgil stood there a moment, drawing in lungfuls of it, then ran for the kitchen, his stockinged feet padding on the worn linoleum. He was thinking about the black Pontiac parked in the garage, loaded with machine guns and shotguns, tank full of gas. Hazel would be all right; the law never touched women. He’d come back later and get her. Then Mexico. Maybe Alex would be along too, if he escaped tonight.

  When he got to the kitchen and the back door, he found it shot apart, hanging precariously on its smashed hinges, more bullets coming through even as he took note of it. The lawmen were here too. Their machine guns rattled away as if they knew what they were shooting at. Every few seconds, the full-throated roar of a shotgun would sound, its impact splintering what remained of the sideboards and rattling the crockery in the kitchen. Virgil about-faced and headed back down the hallway in the direction of the front door. Tear gas was seeping in from the bedroom in greater volumes than before, meaning that another canister had been fired. He hurried past.

  Hazel ran through the smoke-enshrouded doorway and collided with Virgil. Her eyes were red and swollen and her black hair was plastered damply against her head. Her transparent negligee clung immodestly to her body. “Virgil!” she cried. “Don’t go out there! They’ll kill you!” She clung desperately to him.

 
He struggled with her. The gaping wound in his shoulder had sapped his strength. “Out of my way! I’ll be back for you!”

  She held on. “We’ve got the money! We can get lawyers! Virgil, there’s no need to run!”

  “Get away!” Virgil shoved her away with a mighty effort. She staggered backward and fell down. He leaped over her and bolted for the front door. He paused with his hand on the knob and looked back at her. “Lawyers ain’t for guys like me,” he said, and held up the big Luger. “This is my way.” He studied her a moment longer, then swung open the door and dived out.

  Hazel looked up and saw Annabelle standing at the top of the staircase. She looked like a ghost, her eyes large and dull, her soaked flannel nightgown held about her neck in one gaunt hand. “Alex’s gone,” she said simply, as new gunfire exploded from the front.

  The machine guns of the federal agents were trained on the low veranda when the door opened. There was a pause, during which Farnum caught his breath and held it, his fine nostrils quivering spasmodically. The rain sizzled loudly on the grass and shrubs. Then a gray figure fluttered into sight and leaped over the wooden porch railing. “Fire!” Farnum led the fussilade by a microsecond. The wooden steps flew apart in a flurry of mud and splinters. The dim figure staggered and fell forward onto his hands and knees. We got him, he thought. We got him, we got him, we got him.

  Virgil coughed and shook his head. The grass felt damp, and some of it was his blood. His rib cage was smashed, the splintered bones drawing in and out with each breath. He sucked in a chestful of air, grasped his gun more tightly, and threw himself up off the ground. You bastards, you dirty bastards, I’m gonna survive. He ripped off two short bursts and ran.

  “He’s headed out—on a getaway!” One of the younger agents jerked off a desperate blast at the fleeing figure. It missed a step, weaved for a few paces, and picked up momentum.

  He was past the garage now, and was rapidly closing the gap between himself and the maze of suburban dwellings. Streaks of fire flashed through the curtain of night, picking at the ground around the fugitive, slamming into the trunks of trees, whanging through the garage’s solid doors, ricocheting off the street and sidewalk. The explosions echoed up and down the residential block like a symphony of oversize kettle drums.