Читать книгу The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers - Thomas Mullen - Страница 11

It was dark when the Firefly Brothers crept through their mother’s backyard again.

They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked, scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of sight.

They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough, and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.

No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.

It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival, though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:

PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only when they were alone.

The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace, or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be easier to procure funds on their own.

It felt so strange to be wearing Pop’s old clothes. Whit had gone so far as to name his son after Pop, but to Jason the subject of their father was one best left unmentioned. Yet here were these borrowed clothes, practically screaming at him.

Pop hadn’t been a screamer, but he’d certainly been a preacher. All those endless sayings about the benefits of hard work, early birds getting worms, stitches in time saving nine, so hokey Jason winced to remember them. Patrick Fireson had read countless Horatio Alger novels as a young man and continued to reread them as an adult. They were stories of poor boys who worked through poverty and whose good deeds and work ethic attracted the favor of kindly rich men, who helped them up the ladder. Pop had given copies of the books to his sons, but Jason had found them deathly boring and corny; he’d been more a Huck Finn kind of boy.

But those books had rung true for Pop, who liked to joke that he himself was a character from an Alger novel brought to life. His parents had died in a fire when he was five, and his distant relatives weren’t in a position to help. Pop was sent to a Catholic orphanage, and at the age of twelve he started as a clerk in a small grocery. He toiled there for many years, gradually gaining the good graces of the owner, a thrifty German named Schmidt. Pictures of the young, hardworking Patrick Fireson show a thin lad who always seems to have stopped in the middle of some activity—his hair mussed, his collar loose, his eyes impatient for the camera’s shutter. Pop served in the Great War, returning to the store after nine months with some shrapnel in his right knee but his can-do attitude undiminished. Schmidt’s adult son died of pneumonia in the winter of ‘24, and two years later Pop received an unexpected inheritance from an army buddy. By then Schmidt was tired of the store and the memories they held of his doomed legacy. Pop made him an offer, and the store was his.

“I didn’t have parents,” Pop would say. “My father was a broom and my mother was a mop, and they taught me all I needed to know.” Maybe if Pop had grown up in a real family he would have had a better idea of how to be a father, Jason sometimes thought, instead of simply browbeating his sons with lessons about elbow grease and honesty.

By the time Jason was in high school, Pop was a ranking member of the Boosters Club, meeting with the other local businessmen to trumpet their own virtues and draft plans for the future of their city. Despite his Irish roots, he was an outspoken proponent of Prohibition—“Booze makes young people lazy,” he warned his sons—and later an opponent of speakeasies, even if he himself indulged at home with the occasional glass of whiskey or scotch. He wrote letters to the editor deploring the prevalence of truants running about downtown (and pilfering from his shelves), and he happily gave money to candidates for city council who supported business (and who, unbeknownst to him, would soon become very good friends indeed with the supermarket owners who were eyeing expansion into Lincoln City).

The family store may have been what brought the Firesons out of their cramped apartment and into a modest house in a tree-lined neighborhood, but it had never interested Jason as a career. He’d always thought of it as punishment. Stacking crates, unpacking boxes, filling the shelves, taking inventory, enduring his father’s constant criticism and moralizing—Jason did all these things, from a young age, just as he raked leaves or washed the family car. But he sure didn’t plan on being a professional leaf raker as an adult, so why should he work at the store, either? Let his brothers take over. Whit in particular seemed the natural choice; Pop was different with him, funny and carefree. Whenever Pop imparted advice to his youngest—telling him, for example, that most men were lazy and that the hardworking man had an instant advantage over his competitors—young Whit would listen with a look of awe in his eyes, as if it was an honor to receive such guidance.

Life was a contest, according to Pop, even a battle. You needed to be strong, of course, but also upstanding and honest—a capitalist Sir Galahad—for fortune to shine on you. He worked long hours and spent much of his time at home reading various business papers and journals, ignoring the chaos of his household until he felt called upon to interrupt with lessons of struggle and success.

When Jason was eighteen, only two months away from graduation, he dared to tell his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to work at the store after he finished school.

They were sitting on the front porch, Pop’s cigar burning in an ashtray between them. “And I don’t really see myself being a college boy, either.”

“You don’t want to work, Jason.” Pop wasn’t thin anymore, his hair had gone gray, and he looked older than he was. “You want it all handed to you.”

“No, sir, it’s just that—”

“You want to skate by on charm for as long as you can. You got by on smiling at the teachers and getting your friends to pass you their notes, sure, congratulations. But those tricks don’t work in the adult world, and suddenly all you’ll have to show for yourself is laziness and a smile that won’t last after you’ve taken a few hard knocks.”

“I don’t plan to be lazy, Pop. I just want to go in a different direction.”

“You’ve had a pretty nice life, never really having to scrap for anything.”

“I can scrap just fine.” Jason straightened. He was an inch taller than Pop and already more muscular.

“I don’t mean scrapping for girls, or for attention. I mean scrapping to get by.”

God, not this again. Patrick Fireson’s life had been a series of obstacles to clear. He had conjured invisible advantages from the darkness, had taken emptiness and poverty and turned them into the raw materials of a life’s adventure, et cetera, et cetera. Talking to him wasn’t so much having a conversation as giving him new opportunities to make old points.

“You need to keep moving if you want to stay ahead. Like what I’ve done at the store, expanding and moving forward.”

“I’m just saying maybe there are other things.”

“Such as?”

He told Pop he had some buddies from school, a few years older than him, who worked for a shipping outfit based in Cincinnati, delivering goods across the Midwest. He’d been offered a job and could move in with his friends. Even though truck driving might not sound glamorous, at least he’d get to take a step outside Lincoln City and see something.

“Maybe it’ll only be a few months,” Jason said, playing his trump. “And then I’ll feel like the time’s right to take over the store.”

He didn’t mention the illicit nature of this particular shipping outfit, or that some of these school friends were related to one Petey Killarney, the owner of Lincoln City’s finest speakeasies, to which Jason had begun winning admission in the past few months. After some delicate lobbying over the next two weeks, Jason won Pop’s reluctant blessing to take the job, Pop likely figuring that his headstrong kid soon would learn the hard way about the tough, cruel world.

But did he? He loved bootlegging: the late nights, the secrecy, the cool cats and code words. When you walked through that back door, you were someone special, part of the select group. The man in charge of the operation, Chance McGill, was a few years older than Pop but existed in a different realm. Chance was wise and hardworking, sure, but he didn’t lord it over you. He showed Jason how to talk, how to move, whom to impress and whom to ignore. When Jason spotted a trap on the road one night and managed to elude it, Chance talked him up in the important circles, doubled his pay. Had Pop ever acknowledged anything Jason had done right? The speakeasies were loud and dark and Jason could disappear inside them or do the opposite—be the man of the show, smile at the ladies, who couldn’t resist smiling back. He wasn’t far from home but he felt a lifetime away from Pop’s criticism.

And he was bringing in decent money, which, even then, he wasn’t shy about displaying. His clothes became sharper and tailored, he wore Italian shoes and silk socks, and one night when he rolled into town for a family dinner he was behind the wheel of a shiny new Hudson.

Pop confronted him that night. He had been oddly silent during dinner, but just when Ma was about to serve dessert he finally spoke up.

“I know what you’re driving back and forth across state lines. Machine parts, huh? I suppose, if Petey Killarney’s booze machine is the one you’re talking about.”

Jason shifted in his seat and smiled awkwardly.

“That’s funny to you? Why don’t you tell your brothers what you’ve been peddling?”

Jason glanced across the table at his brothers, who were clearly oblivious.

“I haven’t been peddling anything, Pop. I’ve just been driving.”

Ma asked him to explain, but something in her voice betrayed the fact that she had feared this all along. Jason couldn’t take the disappointment in her eyes, so he looked at his father. Pop’s disappointment was more bearable; Jason had so much experience with it.

“Go ahead, impress your brothers,” Pop said. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Looking good, looking tough? It’s always been about looks to you.”

“Pop, everybody’s still drinking it, laws or no laws. All I’m doing is…administering a public good. It’s like being the milkman.”

“So be a milkman!”

Everyone seemed waxed in place. Jason waited a beat. “It’s not like what the movies and magazines make it out to be. It’s all perfectly safe, and we’re smart about it.”

“You, smart? I find that difficult to believe.”

“For God’s sake, there’s some in your glass right now. You can’t take the Irish out of the Irishman.”

Jason offered his usual disarming smile when he said that, and his uncomprehending little brothers smiled along with him, as they always did. Then Pop’s fist struck the table and their glasses danced.

“I did not raise a family of criminals!”

Things got worse from there. First Pop stood and then so did Jason. His brothers’ chairs slowly backed away, disappearing into the margins. He remembered pointed fingers on both sides, and then fists. He was tired of being told what to do. He was young and proud of himself and stupid, yes, he saw that now. But not then. Then he was yelling and shouting and Ma was telling them to stop, and when it ended Pop told him he was no longer welcome in their house. Fine, Jason thought, trying to convince himself that’s what he’d wanted all along.

He still remembered that line, a family of criminals. He would think of it years later, at Pop’s trial.

Another of Pop’s lines: You’re better than these people.

Jason remembered that one, too, voiced by his old man during their first conversation in a prison visiting room. At the age of twenty-one, Jason had been collared. Chance McGill paid his bail, and Jason spent most of his pretrial time with his new associates, which did not go over well at home. He had told his family that everything would be fine, it was all a mistake, but the look in his mother’s eyes when he’d pleaded as McGill recommended—guilty, a plea bargain, a weaker sentence for the good of the organization—was something he would always remember. He got ten months, with a chance to be out in eight.

He had been surprised on that first Sunday to be told he had a solo visitor. He’d figured his mother would have come with his brothers, that maybe she would have been able to coax Pop as well. But when he walked into the large cinder-block room, prisoners and visitors facing off across six long wooden tables like poker players without cards, he saw, in the back corner, Patrick Fireson sitting alone.

They hadn’t spoken much over the past two years. Pop had made his views clear and Jason hadn’t seen why he should subject himself to such haranguing ever again. So when he saw Pop sitting there he wondered if he could tell the guard that he wasn’t interested in visiting with this particular gentleman. But it was a three-hour drive for the old man—Jason had been caught and tried in Indiana—and Jason didn’t want to send Pop back thinking his son didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye.

He made it to the table and Pop extended a hand. They shook, which felt formal and strange, then he sat. Pop asked how he was doing.

Jason shrugged. “How are Ma and the boys?”

“They’re fine. They wanted to come, too, but I thought I should come alone this one time.” Jason didn’t say anything as Pop looked around. “You know, I’ve worked awfully hard in the one life I’ve been given. Built a strong business, got a good house for my family. And you chose this instead.”

“This wasn’t exactly what I was choosing, Pop.”

“You knew the risks.”

Jason reminded himself that he would have a week, at least, until he could entertain another visitor. That meant one week to replay this conversation in his mind, so he should try, despite the difficulties and temptations, to play it well the first time.

“I guess I made some mistakes, Pop.”

“Yes. I guess you did.”

“I should have driven faster that one time,” he said, grinning. Pop’s face tightened.

“I’m so glad you have your sense of humor. That should make the months fly by.”

“Did you drive all this way just to tell me how I messed up? The judge already told me that. And the prosecutor, and the cops, and half the guys in this room, to be honest.”

“Yeah, what about these guys?” Pop looked around again. “I’ve been thinking about them, studying them a bit as I waited for you. You know, when you’re a parent you can’t help but look at the other kids, think of the different choices the other parents made, the different people your kids are all becoming. I thought about that at your high school graduation, looked at the caps and gowns, wondered where they were all headed. And now I look at your new cohorts here…Are these your people now, Jason?”

“Pop—”

Patrick Fireson leaned forward, lowered his voice. They were still the only two at this table. “You’re better than these people, Jason.”

“I know that.”

“You’ve got a head on your shoulders and you know how to succeed, you know right from wrong. I taught you that. You’re better than these people.”

“I know that,” Jason said, raising his voice.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Jason stared at the wall. He would have punched it if it weren’t cinder block.

They spent most of their thirty minutes that way, trying to talk casually but always forced back to these moments of reckoning. Jason couldn’t tell if his father was trying to help him or torture him.

When the thirty minutes were up, they shook hands again and that was that. The conversation, as he’d expected, didn’t get any better as he thought about it during the week.

The next Sunday the whole family came. Ma didn’t cry, for which Jason was thankful, and Weston and Whit kept staring at the other prisoners, apparently wondering which were ax murderers and which ate children. Jason’s eyes occasionally trailed his father’s, to the two younger sons and back to himself, and he felt worse, not necessarily for what he had done but for what he was forcing his brothers and his mother to see. He sat up straighter that day, smiled more, did what he could to show that this wasn’t so terrible. He joked with his brothers, told Ma how he was teaching some of the men to read, mentioned to Pop that he was studying the Bible a bit (failing to explain that the Good Book was the only reading material prisoners were allowed).

The Sunday after that, it was just Pop again, and Jason tensed, anticipating another browbeating. But it didn’t come. They just talked—about the family, the store, Pop’s real-estate plans, baseball. Eventually Jason realized that Pop was done with the lecturing. He didn’t know if Pop felt he’d pointed out his son’s flaws enough by then or if the old man was silently assessing what fault in this was his own. Over time, Jason learned to let his guard down.

“Tell Weston and Whit that they don’t have to come if they don’t like…seeing me like this,” Jason said one of the times when they were alone. “I’d understand. I don’t want them looking at me in this place and thinking, I don’t know, that this is their future, too.”

“They miss you, Jason.”

Jason nodded, looked away.

“They don’t want to talk about it, but I can tell. They missed you before, when you were out doing all that. But now, too.”

“I’m a lousy brother.”

“Brothers usually are.”

“I’m a lousy son, too.”

“You have your moments.”

Jason let a grin pierce through his self-loathing. Then it faded. “Look, I know I haven’t been…who you want me to be, but—”

“It’s not about what I want. We are what we do, Jason. I’ve tried to show you that. I guess I failed at it. But we are what we do, the choices we make.”

“I know I made some wrong decisions.”

Pop seemed struck by the admission. This would have been, what, the second month? The third? How long had Jason’s reserve of pride and cockiness held out?

“So when I get out of here…could I work at the store again? Or do you have a policy against hiring guys with records?”

Pop smiled. “That policy doesn’t apply to blood relations. And I can always use the cheap labor.”

And that’s what Jason was after his term ended, cheap labor, the prodigal son returned. Smiles all around. The good feelings lasted a few weeks.

Eventually Jason got over his guilt at having been a lousy son and he admitted to himself how incredibly bored he was to be back at the store, performing the same tasks he’d done as a schoolboy, standing behind the same counter, making the same idle talk with the same customers. The onset of Pop’s money troubles only made things worse—the stock crash and the new supermarkets undercutting his business, and the debt Pop had rung up investing in real estate just before the crash. Jason was tired of hearing about it, tired of inheriting someone else’s problems. He told himself he had a right to live his own life. So finally, when Weston was working at the store full-time and Whit was in his final year of school, Jason broke the news as delicately as he could. He thanked Pop for taking him back in and told him no hard feelings this time but he was moving in with some friends to try “something new,” something for himself. Pop said he understood, acting as if his son had not broken his heart again.

But “something new” wound up being something old: bootlegging again. And things didn’t work out quite as Jason had hoped. He would soon do a second stretch in jail for it, but this time there would be no visits from his old man.

Years later, the resurrected Firefly Brothers were driving just north of Lincoln City to the quiet town of Karpis. Even the most devastated of cities seemed to have at least one gleaming suburb like this, the lawns watered and mowed, the Cadillacs washed and waxed. People out here had heard of the depression but didn’t entirely believe the stories.

At the edge of town, where a few restaurants and taverns clung to the one narrow road leading north into emptiness, sat the safe house run by Jason’s old bootlegging mentor, Chance McGill. Chance did a little of This and a little of That. He’d been jailed for This during the early twenties, but he was acquitted of That a few years back, and these days he operated his popular restaurant-nightclub, Last Best Chance, with minimal interference. There were bands three nights a week and dancing showgirls twice, and the card playing that went on in back rooms was permitted by the brass buttons as long as they got their take. A veritable House of Seven Gables of the Midwest underworld, Last Best Chance was as sprawling as its owner’s many pursuits; a dance room had been added a few years back, and then an outdoor patio, and then another bar over here, and some rooms for the ladies over there, until the building was a nearly block-long labyrinth of pleasure and deception. Rumor had it that Chance had designed the floor plan to be as confusing as possible should he and his special guests ever need to elude raiding cops.

Chance and his chatty wife lived on the top floor; also on that floor were several bedrooms that hot boys could stay in, for prices ranging from five bucks to thirty, depending on exactly how much heat was on them. Dillinger had once stayed here, as well as Baby Face Nelson and even Pretty Boy Floyd, far away from his southwestern territory. But no one had doled out more hide-me money than Jason and Whit, until Chance had regretfully told them, back in May, that the volcanically hot Firefly Brothers should start bunking elsewhere.

Jason and his gang often communicated through Chance, leaving messages about when and where they should regroup. Chance knew anyone worth knowing and never seemed to have trouble locating them when the right person asked.

Jason idled in front of the building. A bottle-blond zaftig was strolling toward the entrance.

“Say, doll, do me a favor,” Jason called to her. “Tell Mr. McGill that Officer Rubinsky would like a word. And to bring some smokes.”

She gave him a look as empty as an alcoholic’s shot glass. Then her heels clacked away. It was burlesque night, and the Firesons were treated to a blast of tarnished horns when she opened the door.

Two minutes later another brass blast, longer this time because one of the men was holding the door open. A second was beside him, and the third, Chance McGill himself, was holding a box of cigars and a level gaze aimed cautiously at the Pontiac.

Officer Rubinsky was one of the cops Chance paid protection money to; Chance could see this wasn’t the cop’s wheels.

“We look like a couple of Syndicate torpedoes,” Whit said under his breath. “Probably scaring the hell out of him.”

“Good. It’ll make him easier to read.”

Chance was in his early fifties but had managed to age with the grace of a silent-film star. Usually he moved with a thespian’s confidence, fluidity to every gesture, but now he stepped slowly, as if under water. A thin man, his gray hair was trimmed short and his wrinkles were ironed flat in the neon light. Then his blue eyes lit red.

“Jason?” He was ten feet from the Pontiac.

“Not so loud.” Jason grinned. “Tell your loogans you’re okay. And get in—we have a crazy story for you.”

“You weren’t followed?”

“Only by the Grim Reaper—he tailed us leaving the cemetery. C’mon, get in.”

Chance waved off his men and opened the back door. Jason eased off the brake and began driving the calm streets of Karpis.

“How’s tricks?” Jason asked. Whit had turned halfway in his seat to keep an eye on the restaurateur.

“Not so good as they are for you two, apparently. Jesus. I even offered a prayer for your eternal souls.”

“I’m sure our souls appreciate it.”

“What happened?”

“Look, Chance,” Jason said. “No one needs to know about the crazy hallucinations you’ve been having. Everyone can just go on mourning the dead Firefly Brothers, got it? They can send us all the prayers they like.”

“Understood. That Houdini you pulled in Toledo was impressive, boys, but this one is by far the best.”

“Thanks. And we aren’t going to tell you how we did it, no offense.”

“I wouldn’t ask.”

Jason pulled into a small park and turned around to face his passenger as Chance handed out cigars. Jason hadn’t had a smoke since before the cooling boards, and just by biting off the end he saw that Chance knew how to keep his cops happy.

“Heard anything on Owney?” Jason asked.

Chance produced a lighter and that produced light. “What kind of anything?”

“We were supposed to meet him last week in Detroit.” Jason left it at that. He still couldn’t remember if the meeting had occurred, but the fact that the Points North cops had found the full seventy thousand dollars on the brothers meant that they’d never paid Owney his share, so either the meeting hadn’t happened or it had gone very badly indeed.

“He hasn’t been arrested,” Chance said. “And he ain’t ratted that I know of.”

Even with the windows down they were consumed by delicious smoke.

“Know where he is?”

Chance didn’t answer.

“We still owe him his stake,” Jason explained, not mentioning that they no longer had the money.

Chance exhaled a cloud. They were like three bored dragons in a too-small cave. “There’s a cottage he and his wife have used.”

“In the U.P.?” Jason raised his eyebrows. Chance made an expression that was not fully a confirmation. “Jesus, then he’s an idiot.”

Jason had met Owney Davis in prison during his second bootlegging rap, before graduating to bank jobs. Let out two weeks after Jason, Owney became a part of the Firefly Gang from the beginning. He was a loyal friend whose life ambition was to form a new church, in the hope of spiritual as well as financial enrichment. Jason found it difficult to believe Owney would turn Judas. But he also found it difficult to believe that, with all the heat on them, Owney and his wife would run to the same Michigan lake house they’d used as a hideout months earlier, when the heat had first intensified.

“What’s the word on Marriner, Brickbat, and Roberts?” Jason asked.

“Look, Jason, if someone did stooge on you, it coulda been anyone. Ten grand is a lot of money.”

Ten grand was the most recent reward the Justice Department had posted for information leading to the Firefly Brothers’ arrest. It had started at fifteen hundred, then doubled after two cops were killed during a November bank job in Calumet City, then doubled again in the early spring, when the feds belatedly realized that a fatal February bank job in Baton Rouge had actually been pulled off by the Firefly Brothers. Louisiana was far outside their usual territory, of course; after a busy autumn in the Midwest, the brothers had spent much of the winter hiding out, first in Florida and then in New Orleans. It had been a wise time to hide: the U.S. attorney general and a bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover from something called the Bureau of Investigation were making speeches about the need for a stronger national police force, something capable of investigating the complex cases that bumbling state squads couldn’t handle. A federal crime-fighting agency would conquer gangsterism just as the New Deal would conquer the depression, Hoover claimed. When the Firesons’ money grew scarce—and the exoticism of the South was over-powered by their nostalgia for home—Jason had started scouting banks in Baton Rouge, leading to the reunited gang’s first endeavor in more than two months. After that, the price on the brothers’ heads continued to rise as stories proliferated about their escapades, some of them accurate and some of them the falsely attributed crimes of other, less famous outlaws. Finally, the feds had rounded the price off to an even ten, causing the brothers to wonder if that number would continue to appreciate for as long as they drew breath, or if it would eventually crash like the stock market if people lost interest. Or if they simply disappeared.

“Well,” Jason said now, “we’re hoping to narrow the list of suspects.”

“You should have too many other things on your mind to be interested in revenge, boys.”

“We didn’t say anything about revenge. We’d just like to know if someone did rat on us, so we can avoid that someone in the future.”

“Well, if anyone did they didn’t tell me.”

“I never asked if they did. I just asked if you knew where our boys are.”

“People haven’t been using the Chance McGill line the way they used to, but—”

“Because you wouldn’t let us,” Whit said.

“Damn right I wouldn’t let you!” He held the cigar away from his face and extended a reproachful finger. “I’ve worked my way up inch by inch, son, and I’m not gonna let it get torn down by a couple brothers who’ve managed to get ten state police forces, Pinkertons, postal cops, the National Guard, and the fucking federal government after them, no matter how goddamn charming one of them happens to be.”

Jason put a hand on Whit’s shoulder. “We’re not blaming you for anything, Chance. We’re just—”

“Your brother sure as hell is.”

“Whit didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, back to square one. You’re saying you don’t know hell’s first whispers about where our boys are?”

Chance managed to move his eyes from Whit to Jason. “Marriner’s still living the good life, far as I know.” Marriner Skelty, Jason’s bank-robbing mentor with decades of endeavors to his name, had possessed the good sense to retire after the Calumet City job in November. “As for Brickbat and Roberts, nix.”

“Brickbat was never my biggest fan,” Jason said, to draw him out.

“I always did notice an added degree of tension in the room when he was in it. Crazy bastard. Never shoulda gotten involved with him, Jason.”

“I got wise eventually.”

The brothers had kicked Brickbat and Roberts out of the gang after the bloody Baton Rouge job. Brickbat was as his nickname implied, all stubborn force and no thought. He was only five-six, but his thick frame contained the coiled rage of three generations of doomed Iowa home-steaders. Still, if you were at least a few feet away from him you stood a reasonably good chance of outsmarting him before he got close enough to break your face. Unless he was packing, which he always was. Starting out as the muscle guarding cigarette shipments in St. Paul, he’d worked a few bank jobs with the Barker Gang in Minnesota. According to the police, he’d rubbed three cops in the process; according to Brickbat, the body count was seven. He’d been in the opening months of a permanent holiday courtesy the state of Illinois when he was liberated during the same jailbreak that freed such now-infamous hoods as Henry Pierpont and John Makley, of the Dillinger Gang. Brickbat knew Owney through some work they’d done on a Minnesota bootlegging line, and at the time Jason needed an extra torpedo and figured the man’s brand of pugilistic cockiness would make him a natural for the job. Thus was a regrettable relationship born. Jason quickly tired of the way Brickbat’s palsied trigger finger made bank jobs more violent affairs than they needed to be. Jason had handed Brickbat an extra cut when he booted him from the gang, in the hope that it would constitute ending on good terms, but something in the man’s demeanor had left Jason with the uncomfortable feeling that this was not yet a farewell.

Elton Roberts, Brickbat’s only friend, was a heavy drinker, a trait the Firesons distrusted. A little here and there was fine, but a man who couldn’t be counted on to drive straight or think straight was an unnecessary risk. Fortyish and debonair, Roberts was a grifter who’d spent the past few years ripping off the hopeless jobless across the Midwest. Decked out in a dapper suit and possessing a smooth voice, he looked every bit the trustworthy businessman, or at least what a poor egg thought a trustworthy businessman would look like, if there were any. He would troll the breadlines and find a few suckers, preferably immigrants or farmers who had lost their property and were overwhelmed by their urban environs. He’d tell them he was the manager of a new building in town that needed four elevator operators; the job paid thirty a week—not bad at all—and all the fellows needed to do was front him fifty each for their uniforms. The fellows usually didn’t have that much cash, but they’d ask for a day or two to rustle the funds from their cousins or in-laws or dying grandparents. Once Roberts had their money, he’d tell them the building’s address and ask them to show at eight the next morning. When they did, they would find that Roberts wasn’t there and that the building had no elevator. Roberts bounced from city to city working that grift and a few others before the cops got wise. Then, while doing time, he met a jug marker with a list of banks to hit once he got out. Like a skittering asteroid, Elton Roberts eventually came into Jason’s orbit. Because Roberts looked straight and could talk his way out of trouble, Jason had taken him on as a faceman. He learned about Roberts’s jobshark scams only after a few weeks of working together, when Elton got drunk and boastful. That’s when Jason realized he’d never liked the man.

“Look,” Chance said, “I know Brickbat’s crazy, but I don’t see him for a finger-louse. Last I heard he was gearing for some big job. Was trying to get the Barkers involved, but they wouldn’t bite.”

“What was the job?”

“He wasn’t that talkative.”

Jason eyed him. “You’re not telling us everything.”

“It’d take a week to tell you everything, and you never seem to have enough time. But I’m telling you the important parts.”

Jason turned around and started the engine. “You’re right—I’d love to chin with you all night, but, yeah, we’ve got to go.”

“Where you headed?”

That was at the top of the list of questions Jason wouldn’t answer, so he lied. “Very far from here.”

“Any messages for me to pass on?”

“Dead men don’t pass messages. This never happened.”

“Got it. Except, dead men pass lots of messages. You can take just about any message you want off a dead man.”

Jason declined the philosophical argument and drove back to Last Best Chance in silence.

“Well, if it means anything to you boys, guys are awful broken up over your alleged demise. Lotta depressed folks in my club these days. Buying plenty of drinks, though.”

“That’s nice. Hopefully our funerals will be well attended.” Jason pulled up to the curb in front of the funhouse. Out in the parking lot, an elastic-legged drunk was supported by two prostitutes.

“Thanks for the smokes, Chance,” Jason told him. “And goodbye forever.”

Chance nodded at the two of them, stepping out of the Pontiac. “I’ve heard that one before.” Then he tapped the roof and walked toward his ramshackle empire. No one was watching them as Jason hit the gas and pulled away.

“So,” Jason said to his brother, “if the cops had broken up our meeting with Owney on their own initiative they would have arrested him, too, which Chance would have heard about by now.”

“Or maybe they weren’t just on to Owney—maybe he did rat on us,” Whit said. “Maybe the feds offered him starting-out money for his new church.”

Whit had never been as tight with Owney, perplexed by the many contradictions between the man’s deeds and his proclaimed holiness. A recent convert to revolutionary politics, Whit proudly proclaimed himself an atheist, but to Jason that was just a front for the fact that Whit hadn’t forgiven God for what He did to Pop. Regardless, anyone who claimed a special relationship with the Man Upstairs was someone Whit could not understand.

“I just can’t see Owney rolling on us,” Jason said.

“If we assume there even was a rat and that there isn’t some other explanation, then if it wasn’t Owney, that leaves Brickbat and Roberts.”

“I wasn’t interested in getting mixed up with them anyway. All I wanted to know was whether it was safe to try to find Owney and get him in on the next endeavor. My take is maybe, but maybe not. So let’s avoid the risk and lure Marriner out of retirement instead.”

“You act like all you’re interested in is doing another endeavor. Like you couldn’t care less about finding out what happened to us.”

“It’s what I told Chance: I’m not interested in revenge. I just want to know who to avoid so we can make a score and cash out of this once and for all.”

Whit looked at Jason incredulously. “You’re saying you don’t want to figure out what the hell happened to us?”

Jason sighed. As usual, it would be his job to keep them focused. “We can look into it once we get back on our feet, okay?”

Whit held his hands in front of his face for a moment, staring at them. He’d been doing that a lot lately, Jason had noticed. “We can still bleed, you know, if we cut ourselves.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“It hurts, too.”

The stars were still out but they faded as Jason drove back into Lincoln City. He hadn’t driven with so little fear in weeks—but he did check the rearview every few minutes, out of habit.

“No one’s following us,” he told his brother. “Being dead has its advantages.”