Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  Shit, he thought. We are cooked.

  “What’re we going to do, Earl?”

  “I don’t know! Goddammit, I am thinking on it.”

  “We could split up, go in two ways. One of us ought to make it. We get cops and—”

  “They ain’t no cops coming,” said Earl. “Don’t you get that? They’d be here by now. This is it. This is all there is. And don’t you get it yet? He can see in the dark.”

  “Earl, I am so sorry about them boys I—”

  “Shut up, the two of you, and let me think.”

  Above them, the wall on the left-hand side of the shed exploded, spewing fragments, high-velocity dust, and twenty .30 caliber bullets in a kick-ass blast, which went clean through and blew twenty neater holes in the right-hand side of the wall. The noise banged on their eardrums till they rang like firebells. The smell of pulverized wood filled the air, mingling with the kerosene and the oil.

  “Browning,” said Earl. “He’s about twenty-five yards away over on the left. He can cut us to ribbons if he’s got enough ammo.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Carlo. “I think we bought it.”

  “Not yet,” said Earl. “Not—”

  Another BAR magazine riddled the wall, this time six inches lower. A few of its shots spanged off the potbellied stove.

  Then a voice called out.

  “Say chums, we can finish you anytime.” It was Owney, not far away, with that little twist of fake English gent in his words. “You throw your guns out, come on out hands high, and you can leave. Just get out of town and don’t ever come back, eh? That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You step out,” said Earl to his companions, “and a second later you’re dead.”

  “I’ll give you a minute,” said Owney. “Then I’ll finish you. Make the choice, you bold fellows, or die where you stand.”

  But Earl was rummaging around in the shed. To Carlo he seemed a man obsessed. He cursed and ranted, pushing aside lanterns and crowbars and gloves, standing even, because he knew the BAR man wouldn’t fire as the minute ticked onward until at last—

  “Ah!” he said, sinking back down to the ground with a handful of something indeterminate in the dark.

  “Now you listen up and you listen up good. Henderson, load up them .45s and get ’em cocked and locked.”

  • • •

  Johnny dumped a magazine, even though it had a few rounds left, and snapped in a fresh one so he’d have plenty of ammo.

  He went back to the scope.

  In the green murk, he saw nothing except the outline of the switching shed sitting atop the little hollow. Some dust seemed to float in the air on the side where Herman had hammered two BAR magazines into it, but otherwise it was motionless.

  “Maybe they’re all dead,” Owney said.

  “They ain’t dead,” said Johnny. “That I guarantee you. No, they’re in there like rats in a trap, snarling and trying to figure how to flee.”

  Owney checked his watch.

  “You said a minute. You gave ’em two.”

  “I did,” said Owney. “But I want ’em out. I want ’em found outside, not inside.”

  Once again he rose and yelled.

  “I’m telling you for the last time. Come out and surrender or get shot to pieces in that shed.”

  The gunfire had provoked the dogs all through the Negro district and their barking filled the air. But no sirens screamed and it seemed as if the universe had stalled out, turned to stone. It seemed darker too, as if the townspeople, hearing the firing, had done the wise thing, turned out their lights, and gone into cellars. No yard bulls or brakemen showed; they too conceded the yard to the shooters, and presumably had fallen back on the control tower or the roundhouse for shelter from the bullets.

  “I’m going to give the order to fire,” Owney screamed.

  “We’re coming out!” came a voice.

  “Now there’s a helpful fella,” said Johnny.

  He bent into the scope and saw two men emerge, one supporting the other, their hands up. Then a third. The third would be the dangerous one. He put the scope on him, and his finger went against the trigger and—

  Exploding green stars!

  Brightness, intense and burning!

  The hugeness of fire!

  He blinked as the scope seemed to blossom in green, green everywhere, destroying his vision, and he looked up from it blinking, to see nothing but bright balls popping in his eyes as his optic nerves fired off, and heard the sound of gunfire.

  • • •

  “He’s got night vision, see?” Earl said.

  “Earl, ain’t nobody got night vision,” said D.A. “Talk some sense.”

  “No, he’s got a thing called infrared. Some new government thing. They used it on Okinawa. I heard all about it. You can see in the dark. That’s how he makes them good shots. That’s how come he head-shoots Slim from a hundred yards in pitch dark. He can see us.”

  “Shit,” said Carlo.

  “Now, way that stuff works, it sees heat. Your heat. It shines a light that only he can see. A heat light. But it sees all heat, or all light.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So here’s the deal. I give the signal, I’m going to light this batch of flares. In his scope, it’s all going to white. He ain’t going to see nothing for a few seconds. Then I’m going to lean around the back and keep that BAR boy down with a gun in each hand, fast as I can shoot.”

  “Earl—”

  “You shut up and listen. You take the old man and you run to the sound of the water. You hear that water?”

  Yes: the faint tinkle of water, not too far off.

  “That water. That’s where Hot Springs Creek goes underground. It runs the whole length of Central Avenue underground, about two miles’ worth. You and the old man, you get in there and you keep going till you find a door. It’s the secret get-out for a lot of places, and the bathhouses drain into it too. You get in there, you get in public and you get the hell out of here.”

  “What about you, Earl?”

  “Don’t you no nevermind about me. You do what I say. Here, I want you to take this crowbar too.”

  He held up a crowbar he’d scrounged.

  “There’ll be a boy out there, waiting for you. You should see him, his eyes should be blinded by the flares. You have about a second, you throw this bar and you smash him down, then you run on by to the culvert and you are out of here.”

  “Earl, how do you know about that culvert?”

  “Goddammit! You don’t worry about that, you do what I say.”

  Owney cried again.

  “I’m telling you for the last time. Come out and surrender or get shot to pieces in that shed.”

  The two of them got the old man to his feet, keeping well away from the window. They came to lodge against the doorway, just a second from spilling out.

  “Now are you ready? You ready, old man? I’m going to light these flares and—”

  “I’m going to give the order to fire,” Owney said.

  “We’re coming out!” screamed Carlo.

  “Good,” said Earl. “Look away, don’t look into the flares. I’m going to light these things, then you hand me the guns and—”

  “He hands the guns to me, Earl,” said D.A. “I can’t run nowhere. I got nowhere to run. Give me them pistols, boy.”

  “No!” said Earl.

  “I’m ordering you, Henderson. Earl, light them damn things. Son, give me the pistols ’afore I pass out. You go, goddamn you, and don’t you look back.”

  Carlo didn’t think twice. He handed the two pistols to D.A., who lunged a little away from him and halfway out the door and seemed to find his feet, however wobbly.

  “You old bastard,” said Earl. “You go down and we’ll be back for you.”

  “You do it, goddammit!” said the old man.

  “Shit,” said Earl, and yanked five pieces of tape in rapid succession, which lit the flares. He felt them hiss and burn and their explosive
heat. But his eyes were closed, he didn’t look into them, he edged to the door and then dumped them on the ground.

  “Run!” he commanded, but Carlo was already gone. He followed, and he had a sensation of the old man spinning in the other direction, and he heard the .45s blazing, one in each hand, fastfastfastfast, the old man fired and as Earl ran he saw in the glow a man rising with a tommy gun but slowly, as if blinded himself and Carlo threw the crowbar from ten feet with surprising grace and accuracy and the heavy thing hit the gunman in the chest and hurt him badly so that he stepped back and fell.

  The boy ran on and Earl ran too, out of the glow, and they heard the heavy blast of the BAR and answering shots from D.A.’s .45s.

  Suddenly it was a dirt blizzard. Around them erupted fragments, dust and debris as the carbine gunner got onto them, and the boy stumbled but Earl was by him, had him, and pulled him down into the stream.

  They heard the BAR. They heard the .45s. They heard the BAR. They heard no more .45s.

  “Come on,” said Earl. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You got to go now! It don’t matter that it hurts, you got to go now, with me.”

  And Earl had the boy and was pulling him along, in the dark, through the low tunnel.

  • • •

  “Did you get them?” asked Owney.

  “I think two got down in some kind of ditch. The one out back, Herman finished him.”

  “Shit,” said Owney. “They’d better not get away. Goddammit, they better not get away. If one got away, you know which one it was.”

  Johnny yelled. “Herman, lad, circle around and see where them boys gone. You other fellas, you converge on the shed. We’re coming ourselves.”

  Getting the cumbersome apparatus off the flatcar was not an easy thing but with Jack Ding-Dong doing the labor, they managed. Then Jack carried the heavy battery unit, and Johnny walked ahead with the rifle, scanning through the scope. Owney was just behind.

  “On the right,” said Johnny, and Owney looked and saw a Jayhawker, just a young kid, lying spread out on the ground, his dark suit sodden with blood.

  “They’re all over the goddamned place. We done a good night’s work, we did,” said Johnny.

  “Over here,” yelled Herman.

  They walked on, past poor Vince the Hat de Palmo, who was conscious again, in the ministrations of Red Brown, though he gripped his chest as if he’d been hit by a truck there.

  “Them flares blinded me,” he said to Johnny.

  “There, there, lad,” said Johnny. “They blinded me too.”

  At last they reached a culvert, saw the water glittering through it.

  “That’s where the bastards went. Trust a rat to find a hole. Where does this go?”

  “Under the streets,” said Owney. “Goddamn. Goddamn, the cowboy got away.”

  “But he’s running scared, probably hurt. He’s no problem, Owney. Not for a time. He’ll mend, he’ll come for you. We’ll find him first and put him down. Damn, he’s as sly a dog as they come, isn’t he? How in Jesus’ name did he know of this culvert?”

  “I know what I’ll do,” Owney said. “I’ll call the police.”

  “Johnny, Johnny?”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Who’s still alive?”

  “The old man.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Owney, turning.

  He walked with Johnny quickly back to the shed. In the hollow behind it, the old man had fallen. He lay soaked in his own blood, jacking and twitching with the pain. Herman must have hit him five times, and Johnny two or three times before that. But the gristly old bastard wouldn’t die.

  “He’s a tough boyo,” said Johnny.

  The old man looked up at them, coughed up a red gob, then looked them over.

  “So you’re the fellows done this work? Well, let me tell you, Earl will track you down and give you hell on earth before you go to God’s own hell.”

  “You old turkey buzzard, why don’t you hurry and die,” said Owney. “We don’t have all night for your yapping.”

  “Owney, I marked you for scum the first time I laid eyes on you and I ain’t never wrong about such things.”

  “Yes, but how come then I’m the man with the gun, eh, old man? How come you’re lying there shot to pieces, bleeding out by the quart?”

  “Takes a lot to kill me,” the old man said. Then he actually smiled. “And maybe you don’t have enough pecker-heft to get it done.”

  Owney leaned over him and shot him in the forehead with his Luger like a big hero.

  48

  They ran crouching through the darkness and in a bit of time the slight illumination of the opening disappeared as the underground course of the stream turned this way or that.

  “Jesus, I can’t go on,” moaned Carlo.

  Earl set him down, peeled back his coat and his shirt. The carbine bullet had blown through him high in the back and come clean out the front. He bled profusely from each wound.

  Earl tore the boy’s shirt, and wadded a roll of material into each hole, the entrance and the exit, as the boy bucked in pain and tossed his head. With the boy’s tie, he tied a loop tightly that bound the two crude bandages together. With his own tie, he quickly hung a loop around the boy’s neck, to make a crude sling.

  “Let’s go.”

  “God, Earl, I’m so damned tired. Can’t you go and get help while I rest?”

  “Sonny, they will see you when you can’t see them and they will kill you. If you stay, you die. It’s that simple.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “I know you can. You ain’t hit that bad. Someone has to survive to talk for them boys that didn’t. Someone’s got to remember them boys and what they did and how they was betrayed.”

  “Will you pay them back, Earl? Will you get them?”

  “Damned straight I will.”

  “Earl, don’t. D.A. didn’t want you in trouble. D.A. loved you, Earl. You were his son. Don’t you get that? If you go down, then what he did don’t mean a thing.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy.”

  “No, no,” said the boy. “He sent me to investigate you ’cause he was worried you had a death wish. And then when I found out about your daddy, he told me to get back and not say nothing about it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re wasting your breath. My daddy’s been dead a long time.”

  “Your daddy just died a minute ago and his last wish was that you live and have a happy life, which you have earned.”

  “You just shut that yap now, and come on.”

  “Earl, I’m so tired.”

  “Bobby Lee, you—”

  “I’m not Bobby Lee, Earl. I’m Carlo Henderson. I ain’t your little brother, I’m just a deputy.”

  “Well, whoever you are, mister, you ain’t staying here.”

  With that Earl pulled him to his feet, and pushed him along through the hot, sloppy water in the darkest darkness either of them had ever seen.

  Hot Springs Creek was a sewer and a drain. It smelled of shit and dirty bathwater and booze and blood. As they sloshed along, they heard the skitter of rats. There were snakes down here, and other ugly things that lived under whorehouses and fed on the dead. Maggots and spiders, broken glass, rotting timbers, all lightless and dank, with the stench of bricks a century old and the banks a kind of muddy slop that could have been shit.

  “How much further, Mr. Earl?”

  “Not much. I don’t hear ’em trailing.”

  “I don’t neither.”

  “That goddamned infrared gizmo was probably too heavy to carry along down here, now that I think about it.”

  “Earl, how’d you know of this place?”

  “Shut up. Don’t be talking too much. Another couple of hundred feet and we’ll begin to think about getting out.”

  “Getting out?”

  “Yeah. You’ll never make it if we go all the way to the other end. You’ll bleed ou
t. It’s another mile and a half ahead. But all the speakeasies, the baths, all them places got secret exits, just in case. We’ll get through one of them.”

  “Earl, I am so tired. So goddamned tired.”

  “Henderson, I don’t b’lieve I ever heard you swear before.”

  “If I get out of here I am going to swear, smoke a cigarette and have sexual intercourse with a lady.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good program to me. I might join you, but I’d add a bottle of bourbon to the mix. And I don’t drink no more.”

  “Well, I ain’t ever had no sexual intercourse.”

  “You will, kid. You will. That I guarantee you.”

  He pulled the boy out of the water and up the muddy bank, where he found a heavy wooden door. It seemed to be bolted shut. The boy sat sloppily in the mud, while Earl got out his jackknife and pried at a lock, and in a bit old tumblers groaned and he pulled the thing open two feet, before it stuck again.

  He got the boy up, and the two of them staggered onward through a chamber, up into a cellar, around boxes and crates, and upstairs, and then came out into corridors. The temperature suddenly got very hot, and they bumbled toward a light ahead, and pushed through a door, and found themselves in a moist hot fog with apparitions.

  “Get a doctor, get a doctor!” Earl hollered, but what he heard was screams as shapes ran by him, scattering in abject panic, which he didn’t quite understand, until a naked old lady with undulating breasts ran by him.

  He fell to clean tiles which he soiled with the slop on his shoes and pants as other women ran by, screaming.

  And then a policeman arrived, gun drawn.

  “Get this boy to a hospit—” he started, but the cop hit him, hard, in the face with the pistol barrel, filling his head with stars and pain, and he was aware that others were on him, pinning him. He heard the click as the handcuffs were locked about his pinioned wrists. Then someone hit him again.

  49

  Earl lay in the city jail. No one interviewed him, no one asked him any questions, no one paid him any attention. They let him shower, and gave him a prison uniform to wear, and took his suit out for cleaning. He seemed to just brood and smoke and had trouble sleeping. Late one night, a decent bull who’d been a Marine led him from a cell into an anteroom and let him call his wife, to tell her, once again, he had survived.