Bubber said it would likely be a while before Gustafson could tell us anything about Russell’s condition, and what I ought to do in the meantime was get our bags out of the roadster before somebody else did.
“In case you ain’t never heard,” he said with a tired smile, “the world’s full of damn thieves. A man can’t be too careful.”
We did need dry clothes, and I wanted to retrieve Russell’s revolver from under the car seat. And I had three hundred dollars in my valise. Back at the house, Russell had put the rest of the money in an envelope and taped it behind the water tank over the toilet. Belle asked if it wouldn’t be safer in a bank and Russell said, “You kidding? With so many damn bank robbers on the loose?” It was an argument Buck had always used against putting money in a bank.
Bubber took a key ring from his pocket and detached two keys and handed them to me. “The skinny one’s an extry to my Chrysler,” he said. “It’s down the street a couple of blocks, over by ragtown, front of a pool joint. I let a buddy borrow it to carry some of Mona’s hooch over there. You can use it to fetch your goods to the Hightower without getting them all wet. The other key’s to the room. You all can sleep there tonight.”
He kept a permanent room at the Hightower Hotel, with a private parking spot in back. He and Mona usually stayed there when he was in town because it was farther removed from the oil field and not as noisy as the Wellhead, where she lived.
Mona thought we should wait till the storm passed. “You’ll be soaked to the skin before you take two steps out there.”
Belle laughed and said she didn’t think she could get any wetter than she already was. And I thought Bubber was right—no telling how long the storm would keep up, and the sooner we got our bags out of the stolen roadster the better.
“I’ll ring you at the hotel soon as we know about Russell,” he said.
Belle gave me a look. I hadn’t told Bubber about Russell calling me a bastard and holding a gun on me. About punching him out. About having no idea what his inclination toward me would be if he pulled through.
The car was parked in front of the Miscue Pool Emporium, right where the junction road came into town. We were sodden by the time we reached it and got in out of the slinging sheets of rain.
“Whooo!” Belle said, laughing, swiping water off her face with her hand.
An explosion of thunder made us both flinch—and we busted out laughing. She leaned into me and put her hand to my face and kissed me.
Then came the brightest flashes yet, three or four in rapid sequence and accompanied by a barrage of thunderclaps that shook the Chrysler. I looked out the rear window just as a jagged lightning fork hit the holding tank on the hilltop.
For an arrested moment the entire tank was encased in an incandescent blue light and shedding sparks like a welding torch—and then its roof burst into fire.
Belle turned to look, and her mouth came open.
A tower of orange flames rose from the tank roof and swirled in the gusting wind, casting the street in a quavering light. The handful of people out in the storm began hollering and running to the nearest doors to give warning.
The lightning strike had also undone some of the tank’s welds—streams of burning oil were running down the tank sides. Running into the gullies. Riding the flow of rainwater down the hill and toward the town.
Belle grabbed my arm. “My God, Sonny…let’s go!”
Her expression was as resolute as fearful. I followed her gaze out to the road in front of us. It ran past the ragtown and lay clear of traffic, thanks to the storm. Straight ahead and we’d be free as birds. Just a quick swing through Fort Stockton to get the money from the house.
In that moment, looking out at the road, I envisioned us at our ease at an iron lacework table in a courtyard of stone fountains and deep green shade, sipping bourbon sprigged with mint, myself suited like a dandy, she in a sleek black dress cut low, wearing pearls, her hair grown long and woven in a braid, our conversation soft and teasing as we discussed how best to take our pleasure in the evening ahead, the days to come, the years.
Men were scrambling out of bloated wind-whipped tents, clutching their hats to their heads, gaping in the glowing orange rain at the flaming tank behind us. I cranked up the engine and put the car in gear, everything in me saying Go.
The clamor of alarm was swelling as people swarmed into the street. The rearview mirror shone with firelight. I looked back at the burning oil snaking down the gullies to the foot of the hill and spreading into a widening tide of fire coming steadily on. Cars slewing into the street. People running. Abandoning everything but what they carried with them.
I put the gearshift into neutral and got out of the car.
She slid across the seat and grabbed my coatsleeve as I shut the door. “Sonny, no!”
“Meet you at the house tomorrow,” I said. “Go on.”
“Sonny, please—you’ll burn up!” Her grip twisted in my sleeve.
“Go on, I said!”
“He’s probably dead. He’ll kill you if he’s not. He’s crazy.”
I pulled free of her and backed away from the car. I half expected her to refuse to go, was already telling myself I didn’t have time to argue about it. Her face at the window was golden.
Men came racing past us, yelling, cursing, wearing lunatic looks of panic, of jubilation. The first of the getaway cars swung around the Chrysler with engines racing and klaxons blaring. Another minute and the junction road would be jammed.
Maybe she was crying, maybe it was only the rain. I couldn’t hear what she said for the surrounding pandemonium, but her lips were easy to read.
I love you too, Sonny.
And she drove off in the firelit rain.
I ran down the muddy street, dodging vehicles, shouldering through the throng rushing in the other direction. Men clambering into the beds of passing trucks, hopping onto running boards and bumpers, the stronger shoving aside the weaker. The advancing flow of fire had arrived at the far end of the street and several buildings were already in flame. And still the rain fell and lightning blazed and thunder kept crashing.
There was a tangle of cars in front of the Wildcat, some with a star on their doors. A transport truck with a star too. Men in big hats and gunbelts. Rangers. The rumored raid come true. The lawmen hustling now to rescue those they’d come to arrest. A crush of people at the Wildcat’s front door.
I ran down the alley to the rear of the building and went in by the back way, thinking to get Max’s help in getting Russell downstairs.
He wasn’t at his post. The hallway was dark and hot, smelling of smoke. From the parlor side of the wall came frightened female cries and rough male voices shouting things I couldn’t make out.
The door to Mona’s office was open and I rushed to it, hoping Bubber was still there.
He was. On his back in the middle of the room. On a carpet of blood from his ripped throat. Max beside him, an ear to the floor, a small stained hole in the back of his jacket over the spot where his heart would be.
The room seemed suddenly to lack air.
Mona sat in a corner, knees up to her breasts, hand to her mouth, terrified eyes on Bubber. Then another shuddering crash of thunder and she put her face in her hands and wailed.
Whatever happened here, Russell was upstairs.
I bolted from the room and around to the stairway just as Nurse Rose came swooping down to the landing, face wrenched in terror—and she ran headlong into a beefy Ranger coming from the parlor.
“Whoa, Nellie!” he said, catching her by the shoulders, but she twisted from his grasp and fled around the corner.
As he turned toward me I drew the .380 and swung it backhand and caught him with the barrel just over the ear. His head slung sideways and his big hat tumbled from his redhaired head and he did a couple of shaky sidesteps and his knees buckled and he went down in a heap.
I took the steps two at a time to the landing and ran down the hall to the last door on the
right. The heat much greater now, the smell of smoke stronger.
I yanked open the door and it banged against the wall—and all in an instant saw a man whirl around from looming over Russell, saw the cords standing on Russell’s neck and his mouth open wide in rasping screams almost inaudible in the din from outside, saw that the man’s hand at Russell’s bloody crotch was no hand at all but a bright metal contraption. Saw John Bones grinning fiercely…and the yellow spark of his pistol.
I caromed off the doorjamb and staggered breathless along the wall and heard another gunshot and the room tilted and the floor hit me in the face.
Pain boiling in my gut, wrenching at my knee. The .380 four feet away. Gustafson prone and glass-eyed at the foot of the bed.
Hard gruntings. John Bones arching backward, his neck clenched in Russell’s forearm, his gunhand in Russell’s grip, the pincers somehow wedged behind him.
Crawling to the .380, feeling my belly smearing. The air hazed pink, the floor steaming.
John Bones’ revolver thunks the floor at his booted feet.
Russell screaming—the pincers seized on his forearm, broken bones jutting.
John Bones wresting himself around, clamping the pincers to Russell’s throat. Blood jumps and Russell spasms and falls still.
The .380 in my hand. Cocking.
John Bones crouching, hand closing on his gun.
The .380 kicks and he flings back against the wall and sits hard, legs splaying, gun arm dropping limp under a bloody shoulder, pistol unhanded. His eyes bright on me, pincers on his lap, opening and closing.
Boots stomping hard to the door.
My pistol on John Bones’ great white grin.
Somebody shrieking, “Drop it or die!”
I shoot.
S he finds the back door jimmied, every drawer emptied on the floor, every closet rummaged, every mattress upended. The place ransacked by someone practiced. The envelope gone from behind the toilet tank. The best hiding place for it, they’d said, but what some thieves know, so do others. She takes lunch in a local diner where all the talk is of Blackpatch. The fire reported to be still burning on this following noon. Sixty-three dead and counting. Not a building left standing. Gonna have to call it Blacker patch, some wiseguy snickers, and gets more hard looks than laughs. She waits three days before admitting to herself what she has known from the moment he got out of the car. Then fuels the Chrysler and heads east, in the direction of New Orleans. She has a total of two dollars and forty cents, which meager stake might have been worrisome but for her discovery of a fully loaded .44 under the car seat. It is all she will need, she knows, to make her way in this world.
About the Author
JAMES CARLOS BLAKE has written seven books of fiction, including In the Rogue Blood (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Red Grass River (winner of the Chautauqua South Book Award), Borderlands (winner of the Southwest Book Award), and the critically acclaimed Wildwood Boys. He is also the author of The Pistoleer and The Friends of Pancho Villa. He resides in southeast Arizona.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE FOR
A World of THIEVES
“Blake writes with a command of the language and a deft ear for dialogue that few novelists possess…. A World of Thieves is classic Blake, mixing violence with passion, the hardnose with the sensitive. No one out there does this better.”
—Tom Walker, book editor, Denver Post
“Blake is one of the more talented practitioners of tough-guy fiction…. A World of Thieves is a powerful book [with] compellingly drawn characters.”
—Tom Pilkington, Dallas Morning News
“In a splendid ode to hard-drinking Jazz Age desperadoes, James Carlos Blake jimmies open Cormac McCarthy’s safe and runs off with the twanging strings McCarthy brings to the American sentence…. Blake remains a poet of the damned who writes like anangel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A hard-driving, entertaining novel full of outsized characters and as much humor as brutality.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Writing doesn’t get much better than this. Unforced, honest…. A novel that delivers. Fabulous and unforgettable.”
—New York Review of Fiction
“A deliciously visual story…. Blake seems to revel in biting off bigchunks of American history and letting the blood dribble between his teeth.”
—Austin Chronicle
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A World of Thieves Page 29
