Читать книгу Border City Blues 2-Book Bundle - Michael Januska - Страница 9

COLLISION COURSE

The referendum results had a sobering effect on Billy McCloskey. When at the end of the summer there began to be supply issues at his local roadhouse and his liver finally got a day off, he took the opportunity to ask the proprietor what all the fuss was about.

Pierre explained it to him, and Billy, being fairly lucid, took it pretty hard, like he was just handed a prison sentence. He asked Pierre how he planned to remedy the situation. Pierre told Billy not to worry — everything would be taken care of. He was in good with Windsor’s biggest bootlegger.

This took Billy by surprise. There were plenty of smugglers out here on the Ojibway shores, and lots of folks making moonshine, including his pa. He told Pierre he didn’t have to go to Windsor to get his liquor. Pierre saw it a little differently.

“I didn’t have any choice, Billy.”

The barfly smelled a rat. “Oh yeah? Who was it set you up?”

Pierre hesitated. He should have kept his big mouth shut. He braced himself before uttering the words. “Your brother.”

After Billy climbed back on his barstool he started with the questions. “When did my brother get back? Who is he working for? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“We tried,” said Pierre, “but you’ve been drunk since Armistice.”

This news didn’t sit well with Billy. As far as he was concerned, Jack had deserted his friends and family a long time ago and had no right coming back like this only to put the screws on the local citizenry. It just wasn’t right.

“Does my pa know about this?”

There was no point in holding back now.

“Yep.”

Billy gave that one a think while Pierre riffled through the icebox below the bar.

“There’s one legal beer left and it’s got your name on it.”

“Keep it for a souvenir.”

“You feeling okay? Hey — where you going?”

Billy was going to fight fire with fire. The first thing he did was bring a telephone into the house.

“Welcome to the modern age,” he said to his pa, “now you can call ahead to Chappell House so they have your suds ready when you get there.”

“They’ll have the cops ready for me too.”

Then he invested in a better boat for ferrying his product — a 28-footer with 180 horses. It was low-slung and lightweight, making it easy to hide among the bulrushes and manoeuvre through the canals. Billy christened her River Rat with a jar of his pa’s moonshine. Actually, it was weak lemonade; Billy never let a drop go to waste.

Next he developed partnerships that would save him work and buy him a few allies. Some folks in the area had connections in Quebec distilleries, and Billy arranged either to act as their local wholesaler or to broker deals for them into the States.

Lastly he cleared some space for surplus liquor in the old cabin that stood between the house and the shore. Newlyweds Frank and Mary McCloskey had lived here while the house was being built. It later became Frank’s fishing cabin, his “home away from home,” and where he kept his still. More recently it was where Billy spent his lost weekends. And when those weekends turned into weeks, his pa would have to drag him out and leave him in the sun to dry. Now the cabin had a new purpose.

“Yer not getting rid of my still, are you, boy?”

“No, Pa,” said Billy. “We’re gonna need it.”

It was all about supply and demand, and Billy was ideally situated. Several weeks later — by the end of October — Billy became the leader of a smuggling outfit that served a small but potentially lucrative territory just downriver from Detroit, mainly around Ecorse and the Rouge. Part of him thought it was a nice little cottage industry. Another part of him thought it was only the beginning.

It was at a ceremony at the Armouries for Great War Veterans where Jack first heard about his brother’s ambitions.

“I thought he was working for you, Jack,” said an old comrade from the 99th.

McCloskey tried not to look surprised. “No, no he’s not.”

“But you knew about it, right?”

The fellow was goading him on, and he knew it.

“Sure. We have an agreement.”

“Whatever you say, Jack.”

“Goddamnit,” McCloskey muttered under his breath as the soldier walked away. If this yolk knew the score, the Lieutenant probably did too. Life was suddenly very complicated again. It was just like when they were kids; Billy had to have the same as what Jack had, and all the better if it took a little away from Jack in the bargain.

There was that, and then there was the Lieutenant. If he knew that Billy and some ragtag outfit were encroaching on his territory, and by territory that meant everything within a hundred miles outside of Detroit, there would be serious hell to pay.

Once again McCloskey made a compromise. In an effort to save his father from getting tangled in any of this, he would deal only with Billy. He telephoned Pierre at Chappell House and asked him to keep tabs on his pa’s movements. When Pierre called back a few days later, he informed Jack that his father had gone fishing up in Michigan. Jack then took the opportunity to drive out to Ojibway to have a word with his brother. It promised to be an interesting conversation.

“Long time no see,” said Jack.

“Yeah, long time.”

They were standing on the stretch of property between the house and Front Road. Billy was tying up a young peach tree. He looked like a new man, Jack thought.

“You know why I’m here?”

“Yeah, you come to fix the hole in the roof.”

“You’re not going to give me a hard time about this, are you?”

“Give you a hard time? Jack, I’m just a small-time businessman trying to make a buck.”

“I want you to quit your bootlegging before my boss asks me to do something I really don’t want to do.”

“Like what?”

Billy took a step closer to his brother. He was lean, muscular, all springs and coils. He was prepared for a fight but Jack wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“I’m telling you, Billy, if it weren’t for Pa —”

“If it weren’t for Pa what?”

“Just leave him out of this,” said Jack and walked away. Billy followed him to his car.

“Gosh, Jack, I didn’t know you cared. He’ll ask about you, you know. What should I tell him? That you had dinner reservations in Detroit? That you had to go harass our neighbours?”

Jack turned. “I mean it — leave him out of this.”

“He’s in it, Jack, like he always has been.”

“What the hell are you trying to prove, Billy?”

“That like your boss, you’re just a bum in a fancy suit. I’m the one out here on the homestead, looking out for my own. You’re a long way from Ojibway now, aren’t you, Jack?”

“You’re so full of shit you’d embarrass an outhouse.”

Jack climbed back into his Studebaker. He had wanted to ask Billy about Clara, his sister-in-law, but he was all out of polite talk.

“Shut down your little lemonade stand, Billy, before I have to come back and shut it down for you.”

Jack’s car kicked dust all the way up the path to the road. After regaining control of himself and the Studebaker, he got to thinking. Sure, what Billy said was true: smuggling was the family business and their pa was a player. But Billy was such a schemer, a sloppy one at that, and their pa could get caught in his undertow. Jack knew that unless he could get Billy to cease and desist, they were all headed for a heap of trouble.

Meanwhile, all fired up by the exchange with his brother, Billy decided to step up his operation and get his father even more involved. Locals started taking him more seriously. Eventually, a neighbour, Moe Lesperance, said he had a relative in Belle River who wanted in on the action. Billy was intrigued but played hard to get.

“Let me think about it.”

Belle River was centrally located at the top of Essex County — a rectangular peninsula framed by Lake St. Clair to the north, the Detroit River to the north and west, and Lake Erie to the south. On a map it resembled a fist delivering an uppercut to Michigan’s jaw. Where Lake St. Clair flows into the Detroit River, strip farms give way to a string of municipalities known as the Border Cities: Riverside, Ford City, and Walkerville, where the river narrows until it’s a mile wide at Windsor and you’d swear you can hear the factory whistles in Detroit. Next is Sandwich, and at the point where the river runs due south is Ojibway, a tiny farming community. Heading out of the Border Cities and then east along Erie’s north shore, you eventually hit Kingsville. If you travelled north as the crow flies, from there you’d wind up back in Belle River. Billy saw Ojibway and Belle River as strategic locations, providing easy access to waterways, Windsor and Detroit, and the interior of Essex County.

“You know, Belle River just might work,” he said to his father one day out of the blue. They were chopping wood in the yard. It was early December and their shoulders and arms were powdered with the season’s first snowfall. “We could set up a route along the back roads of the county. If we take Maidstone Crossing, we might even be able to pick up some extra business along the way.”

His father saw an opportunity to control the overland supply routes into the Border Cities. The neck of the peninsula was less than twenty-five miles of flat farmland with only a few passable roads and a couple of railway lines connecting it to the rest of the province. If they controlled that frontier, it would only leave the river, and the river was a fast-moving no man’s land.

“Tell you what,” Frank McCloskey said, “I’ve done a bit of business out there before. I’ll make the trip.”

Billy smiled. This is just what he wanted to hear. Plans were drawn up for an annex operation in Belle River. Boats would be refurbished over the winter, materials ordered for new docks, and stills fired up along the county roads.

Less than a week later, Lesperance got a call from his cousin Bernie. The deal was off. What Lesperance and McCloskey & Son were unaware of was that the Lieutenant’s boys were also knocking on doors in Belle River. Any operation that impacted negatively on their business had to be either assimilated or eliminated. They were finished making overtures; now they were delivering ultimatums. Frank McCloskey took Lesperance out to investigate, but now no one would even give them the time of day.

The Lieutenant called Jack into his office to explain this business with his family. Before stepping across the threshold, McCloskey asked himself which would be worse: to lie and say he knew nothing, or to tell the Lieutenant the truth and say he knew but hadn’t come clean. McCloskey lied. He owed it to blood being thicker than whisky. He swore to the Lieutenant that he knew nothing about their activities and in fact hadn’t had words with them in years. The Lieutenant wasn’t interested in the family history. He just wanted the matter resolved.

“Listen, Killer, the boys’ll take care of those frogs in the county, but I want you to lean on your father and brother.”

McCloskey said he would deal with it.

One of Billy’s overland suppliers was scheduled to make a delivery the next day. A provincial policeman being paid by Billy to keep the way clear reported this to Jack. The lesson to be learned here is that while good money might buy you information, better money will buy you a snitch. McCloskey headed the supplier off at Maidstone and relieved him of his whisky, his gun and, as an added touch, his pants.

“Next time you want to do business in the Border Cities, get in touch with the Lieutenant first.”

Billy phoned his contact the next morning and demanded an explanation. The contact told Billy what happened and said word was out that the Lieutenant was running things between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair.

“I’m telling you kid, you’re finished.”

The man hung up before Billy had a chance to form a reply. Billy tore the phone off the wall and hurled it through the kitchen window.