Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  More objects wrapped in canvas lay inside. He removed them, then unwrapped them, seeing each gleam dully in the yellow light. Each still wore that slick of oil that would keep it safe from the elements. He knew the parts so well. The frame and stock group, the barrel and receiver group, the bolt and recoil-spring group, the buffer and buffer pad. They all slid together with the neatness of something well designed. He knew the gun’s trickery, all the little nuances of its complexity, where the bolt had to be, how the pins had to be set, when to screw in the bolt handle. Finally he slid the frame and stock group together and locked it in, and the thing assumed its ultimate shape. It took less than three minutes and he held his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, with its finless barrel and its snout of muzzle, like a pig’s ugly nose, its bluntness, its utilitarian grayness, its faded wood and scratched grip. He also had ten 30-round magazines and in the trunk of his car a thousand rounds of .45 ball tracer that he’d meant to trade to some other law enforcement agency.

  Now, as in so many other nights of his life these past years, he had to get somewhere by the dawn. In the dawn, the killing would begin.

  62

  At last, with a burst of energy from its 324 Packard horses, the Ford wagon got up a little hill and broke free from the trees.

  “We’re here,” said Johnny Spanish, “with more than an hour to spare. Did I not tell you, Owney, you English sot, I’d have it done in time for you?”

  Owney felt a vast relief.

  He stumbled from the vehicle, taking in a breath of air, feeling it explode in his lungs.

  The field seemed to extend for a hundred miles in each way under a starry sky and a bright bone moon. In pale glow it undulated ever so slightly from one end to the other. He could make out a low ridge of hills at the far side but on this side there were only trees as the elevation led up to it.

  The last hours had been ghastly. Slow travel down dirt roads, at least twice when the engine seemed to stall, rough little scuts of inclines where all the boys had to get out and Johnny’s deft skills alone, his gentleness with the engine, his knowing the balance and power of the automobile, when those alone had gotten them up and to another level.

  How had Johnny known so well? It had been six years since, and in that experience that old sheriff had been the guide. He must have some memory. He was definitely a genius.

  “You did it, lad,” he said to Johnny.

  “That I did. You’re grateful now, Owney, but come the pay-up time it won’t seem like so much. You’ll come to believe you yourself could have done it and what I did will seem as nothing. Then you’ll try to jew me down hard, I know.”

  “No,” said Owney. “Fair is fair. You boys done two hard jobs in the last two weeks. I’ll pay you double what I paid for the yard job.”

  “Think six times, Owney.”

  “Six!”

  “Six. Not twice times, but six times. It’s fair. It leaves you with a lot of what you’ve got.”

  “Jesus. It was a one-day job.”

  “Six, Owney. It was a five-day job, with lots of arranging to be done. Else you’d be looking at the rest of your time in an Arkansas Dannamora.”

  “Four and it’s a deal.”

  “All right, Owney, because I don’t like to mess about. Make it five, we shake on it, and that would be that.”

  Owney extended his hand. He had just paid $1.5 million for his new life. But he had another $7 million left, and beyond that, $3 million in European banks that neither a Johnny Spanish nor a Bugsy Siegel nor a Meyer Lansky knew a thing about.

  They shook.

  “Boys, we’re rich,” said Johnny.

  “Richer, you mean,” said Owney.

  “We’re set for life. No more jobs. We can toss the tommies off the Santa Monica fishing pier.”

  “Believe I’ll keep my Browning,” said Herman. “You never know when it’ll come in handy.”

  “All right, you lot, just a bit more to do. You know the drill.”

  They had to secure the field for landing. This involved reading the wind, for the plane landed against it and took off with it. As efficiently as any OSS team setting up a clandestine landing in occupied France, Johnny’s boys picked some equipment out of the rear of the big Ford and went deep into the valley. There they quickly assembled a wind pylon and read the prevailing breeze. It was now only a matter of using a flare to signal the aircraft when she came, then turning her, then climbing aboard and it was all over.

  While the boys did their work, and then moved the car to the appropriate spot in the valley, Owney took out and lit a cigar. It was a Cohiba, from the island, a long thing with a tasty, spicy tang to it, and it calmed him down.

  He had made it. He, Owney, had done it. He was out; he would repair to the tropics and begin to plot, to raise a new crew, to pay back his debts, to engineer a way back into the rackets.

  He had an image of Bugsy after the hit. He imagined Bugsy’s face, blown open by bullets. Bugsy in one of his famous creamy suits, spattered with black blood, his athlete’s grace turned to travesty by the twisted position into which he had fallen. He saw Bugsy as the centerpiece in a tabloid photo, its harshness turning his death into some grotesque carnival. When a gangster died, the public loved it. The gangsters were really the royalty of America, bigger in their way than movie stars, for the movies the gangsters starred in were real life, played out in headlines, whereas an actor’s heroics took place only in a fantasy realm. A star in a moving picture could come back and make another one; a star in a tabloid picture could not, and that impressed incredible élan and grace upon the gangster world. It was glamorous like the movies but real like life and death itself.

  Then he heard it. Oh, so nice.

  From far off the buzz of a multiengine plane. She’d circle a bit, waiting for a little more of the light that was beginning to creep across the western sky to illuminate the valley, then down she’d come. It was a good boy, or so Johnny insisted. A former Army bomber pilot who could make an airplane do anything she could do and had set planes down on dusty strips all over the Pacific. But before that the boy had run booze and narcotics for some Detroit big boys, where he really learned his craft.

  High up, the plane caught a glimpse of sun, and it sparkled for just a second, just like Owney Maddox’s future.

  Owney turned and before him suddenly loomed a shape, huge and terrifying.

  It took his breath away.

  Don’t let me die! he thought, but it was not a man-made thing at all, or even a man. It was some kind of giant reddish deer, with a spray of antlers like a myth. The beast seemed to rise above him. His throat clogged with fear. In the rising light he saw its eyes as they examined him imperially, as if he were the subject. It sniffed, and pawed, then turned its mighty head. In two huge, loping bounds it was gone.

  Jesus Christ, he thought.

  What the hell was that?

  He didn’t like it, somehow. The animal’s presence, its arrogance, its lack of fear, its contempt seemed like a bad omen. He realized his pulse was rocketing and that he was covered with a sheen of sweat.

  “Owney, lad, come out of the field or you’ll get cut to pieces by the props of your savior,” called Johnny.

  63

  The pain came every two minutes now. It built, like a worm growing to a snake growing to a python growing to a sea serpent or some other mystical creature, red hot and glowing, screaming of its own volition, a spasm, an undulation, a sweat-cracking, muscle-killing pure heat. Someone screamed. It was her. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

  From her perspective, she could only see eyes. The eyes of the young doctor and they looked scared. She knew something was wrong.

  “Let me give you some anesthetic, Mrs. Swagger.”

  “No,” she said. “No gas.”

  “Mrs. Swagger, you’re only a little dilated and you’ve got some hours to go. There’s no need to suffer.”

  “No gas. No gas! I’m fine. I want my husband. Is Earl here? Earl, Earl, where
are you? Earl?”

  “Ma’am,” said the nurse, looking over, “ma’am, we haven’t been able to reach your husband.”

  “I want Earl. I want Earl here. He said he’d be here for me.”

  “Ma’am, he’s got time. It’s going to be a bit. We’ll get you into the delivery room when you’ve dilated to ten centimeters. He’ll get here fine, I’m sure. I just think you’d be more comfortable if—”

  The pain had her again. The snake roped through her body. How could such a little bitsy thing hurt so much? She was so afraid of letting down Earl. But at the same time, where was Earl?

  “Ma’am, I’m going to get your friend. She can be with you. That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary swam into view.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’ll call Phil at the shop. He’ll go straight home. He’ll go to your house and wait on the front steps for your husband.”

  “Key,” she said.

  “What, honey?”

  “Key. Key in the flowerpot to right of door, third pot. Answer phone.”

  “Yes. I’ll tell him. He’ll wait inside and if Earl calls he’ll tell him where you are, so Earl can come direct.”

  “Where is Earl?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I’m sure he’ll be there as soon as he can.”

  “I’m not strong.”

  “Oh, yes you are, baby. You are the strongest. You got through this whole thing without Earl, and you’ll get through this if you have to. I know you’ve got the strength in you.”

  The pain had her again.

  “What’s wrong, Mary?” she said.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” said Mary, but she flashed an uneasy look at the doctor. “You’re having a baby. I have been led to believe it hurts a bit.”

  “I can tell something is wrong. Don’t let them take my baby. They can’t have my baby. I don’t want the gas. If I have the gas, they’ll take my baby.”

  “No, sweetie, that won’t happen.”

  But again she had a guilty look.

  In time the two women were alone as the doctor, the only one on call this late hour in the near-empty Scott County hospital, went on his rounds, such as they were. They weren’t much because “hospital” was entirely too grand a word for this place; it was more a poverty ward with an operating room/delivery room/emergency room attached, because the quality went up to Fort Smith or over to Little Rock with their medical problems.

  Mary came over with a conspiratorial look on her face.

  “Baby, they don’t want you to know, but they want you to take the gas.”

  “What’s wrong? Oh, God, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s called a posterior presentation. The baby is facing down, not up, and he can’t come out down.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “With another doctor, they might be able to turn him when you dilate some more. Then they’d cut you a little and remove him and sew you up. But they need two doctors. They can’t do it with one doctor.”

  “Don’t let them take my baby.”

  “Honey, you may have to—”

  “No, no, no. No!” Her hand flew to Mary’s and grabbed it tightly. “Don’t let them hurt my baby.”

  “Honey, if they can’t get the baby turned, they may have to do something to save your—”

  “No. No! Don’t hurt my baby! Cut me but don’t hurt the baby.”

  Mary started to cry as she held tightly to Junie’s wan hand.

  “You are so brave. You are braver than any man who ever lived, sweetie. But you can’t give up your life to—”

  “No,” she said. “Earl will—”

  “Earl would make the same decision. He wants you to be with him. You can have other babies. You can’t give up your life for one baby. What would Earl do? He’d be by himself with a baby he wouldn’t know how to care for.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want them to hurt my baby. They can’t take the baby! Don’t let them take the baby. Earl will be here. Earl will save us both.”

  “Honey, I—”

  The pain had her again, and she jacked as it flashed through her.

  Earl? Where are you, Earl? Earl, please come.

  64

  Earl lay on his back. The dew had soaked through his coat. His hat was a pillow. He could see nothing but sky lightening as the sun came up. A cool wind rushed through the grass that concealed him. He could have been any man on a park bench or a camping ground, stretching, damp, a little twitchy as the dawn came up and a new day began.

  But no other man would have a tommy gun cradled in his arms across his chest and no other man would carry nine other stick magazines loaded with ball tracer in the pockets of his coat or stuffed inside his belt—oh, for a Marine knapsack.

  But Earl lay calmly, letting his heartbeat subside, letting his body cool. He was at the long end of a desperate journey across the northwest corner of Polk County, guided by an old map and his instincts. The car had taken him along dirt roads through vast forest and a nickel compass kept him oriented toward the section of the county where Hard Bargain Valley just had to be.

  When he ran out of road, he took ten minutes to load up his magazines and his weapon, then he headed off on a track trending north by northwest, through strange forest, across swollen streams, and finally up a raw incline. It seemed to take forever; he thought of a night or two in the Pacific, the ’Canal especially, when the jungle had been like this, dense and dark and unyielding. You hated to be in it at night because the night belonged to the Japs, and them little monkeys could make you stew meat if they wanted. But there were no Japs in this jungle, except his own memories, his own fears, his own angers.

  The worst part of the ordeal came at around 5:30 when the land, which should have been rising steadily to Hard Bargain Valley, instead seemed to straighten out. He kept his trust going in the cheap compass, but then he wondered if the presence of so much metal in the tommy gun and all the ammo had knocked it askew. But it held to a steady N and he kept orienting himself to the right of that pointing arrow, even though in the dark his doubts mounted fearfully. He had no other choice.

  And then, as sweet a sound as he’d ever heard, there came the whine of a cruising plane, holding at about two thousand feet in a steady drone. That had to be it. That was Hard Bargain Valley and the plane that came for its human cargo.

  Abruptly he ran into ridge, heavily overgrown, and made his way up it as quickly as he could. Thank God the tommy had a sling, for without one, the going would have been almost impossible. The gun hung on his shoulder, heavy and dense with that special weight that loaded weapons have, as he pulled himself up.

  Then he saw it: the broad sweep of valley, flat and only gently undulating, pure natural landing strip, and on the other side other hills, and beyond them, presumably, mountains, for the darkness still closed out longer views.

  Earl could see some kind of activity at the far end of the valley. He knew that’s where Owney and his boys would be waiting for the plane to land.

  Thus he edged down to the valley floor, still shielded for another few minutes by the darkness, and duck-walked out to the center. The plane had to land over him. When it did, he would empty a magazine into the nearest engine, concentrating all his firepower. That would drive it away. It would not land and then he would close with Owney and his boys, and although the odds were one against six it didn’t much matter: business had to be taken care of, accounts settled, and there was no one else about to do it.

  A shift in the pitch of the engines of the orbiting plane signified that enough light had arrived at last. Earl craned his head up a bit and saw the plane far off to the northwest, one wing tip high, the other low as it fluted in its approach to the landing path. It seemed to waver in the air as it turned, then straightened, then lowered itself. The gear was already down. It was some kind of low-winged twin-engine Beechcraft, a sturdy, prosaic aircraft. The pilot found his angle and seemed to come in on a string, bearing straight for
Earl, coming faster and faster and lower and lower.

  Earl’s fingers flew involuntarily to the weapon’s controls, to test them for the millionth time: the one lever was cranked fully forward to FIRE and the other fully forward to FULL. Then his fingers dipped under the weapon and touched the bolt handle on the other side, to check again that it was drawn back and cocked.

  The gun seemed to rise to him and he rose from the grass. The butt plate found his shoulder and all ten pounds of the weapon clamped hard against himself as his vision reduced only to that narrow circle of visibility that was the peep sight. He saw: the flat of the receiver top, the diminishing blunt tube of the barrel and the single central blade of sight. The plane seemed to double, then double again in size as it roared at him, dropping ever lower. He knew that the increase in speed was a function of its closing the distance and it seemed to double again, its roar filling the air, and he pulled the gun up through it, sighting on the right-side engine, leading it, and when the computational machine in his brain so instructed, pulling the trigger and holding it down while running the gun on a smooth rotation from nine o’clock up to midnight and then over to two o’clock.

  The gun emptied in one spasm, the sound lost in the roar of the plane. He could sense the empties tumbling, feel the liquid, almost hydraulic pressure of the recoil without a sense of the individual shots as it drove into his shoulder, but most of all he could see the tracers flicking out and extending his touch until he was an angry God destroying the world from afar. The arc of tracers flew into the engine and wing root and the plane trembled ever so slightly, then changed engine pitches again as it pulled up, banked right and flew out of the zone of fire. It seemed to dip, for flames poured from the engine, but then the pilot feathered it, and only a gush of smoke remained, a stain he pulled across the sky with him, and he waggled his wings and headed elsewhere.