“Just let me out and I’ll ask.”

 

“I know where I’m going.”

 

“You don’t even know what state you’re in.”

 

“I’d tell you but then he’d hear me say.”

 

“Goddamn.”

 

“Just lean back and enjoy the ride.”

 

“That’s what they tell the bastards in the electric chair.”

 

 

 

 

 

AGENT COLVIN DROVE JONES AND DOC WHITE OUT TO THE CROSSROADS made famous in the afternoon papers, Jarrett riding with them and pointing them to the exact spot where the gunmen had stopped and the two villains pulled out his wallet and took his cash. Jarrett seemed a little theatrical about the whole ordeal, walking off the paces and acting out the parts as if Jones were interested in some kind of Passion play.

 

“If only I had a gun,” said the rich man.

 

“And then what?” Doc White asked.

 

Jarrett started to say something but thought better of it.

 

He was a well-dressed man with the beaten face and accent of a rough-neck. Jones figured he’d spent many a day in the heat with oil deep under his fingernails and sun burning his neck before people started calling him sir.

 

A full silver moon hung overhead. Big and fat, the way a moon can only look in the country, and Jones didn’t even need a flashlight as he found the tire tracks with ease and squatted down, studying the pattern. He found matches in his shirt pocket, filled his bowl with tobacco, and lit it.

 

He looked up at the long endless road when he got the pipe going, Doc studying the tracks over Jones’s shoulder.

 

“Firestone,” Doc said.

 

“New?”

 

“Last year’s make.”

 

“You boys can tell that just from the tracks?” Jarrett asked.

 

Jones stood and walked along the tracks, taking the exact direction the farmer had noted. He pulled a small leather notebook from his coat pocket and inked in a few passages.

 

“He’s headed south,” Jones said, pipe set hard in his teeth.

 

“But the tracks go to Tulsa,” Jarrett said.

 

“Yes, sir, they do,” Jones said.

 

“Dirty kidnappers,” White said. “Remember when we’d catch fellas like this and chain ’em to a mesquite tree like Christmas ornaments?”

 

“No, I don’t, Doc. You must’ve confused me with someone else.”

 

“Horseshit,” White said. “Those Mexes jumped us outside Harlington? Remember? They’d been running whores and cheating cards out of the Domingo Roach, and we got some of ’em and tracked the rest down a trail where’d they’d laid a fire. Those bastards ambushed us right there, and we shot three of ’em dead? That wasn’t that long ago.”

 

“Nineteen hundred and thirteen.”

 

“You said you don’t recall.”

 

“I just wanted to see if you remembered who shot who.”

 

“You boys were Rangers?” Jarrett asked.

 

“Did you know Jim Dunaway?”

 

“Sure,” White said. “He lasted two weeks before being mustered out for drunkenness and insubordination.”

 

The silence was broken by the grumble of a low-flying airplane, and the men craned their heads to watch it pass in the night.

 

They continued on, following the tracks, Colvin driving slow behind them, the engine ticking and their feet crunching on gravel, moonlight leading the way.

 

About a half mile down from the crossroads, Jarrett about jumped out of his britches at the sight of a coiled rattlesnake raising its head, ready to strike.

 

“Holy shit!”

 

Jones shined his light, and the snake slithered off into the ditch.

 

“Shoot it,” Jarrett yelled. “Shoot it!”

 

“I’m not gonna shoot it,” Jones said. “Has the same right bein’ out here as us.”

 

“You ever been bit?” Jarrett asked. “Nearly killed me one time.”

 

“They just actin’ according to their nature,” Jones said. “Can’t fault ’em for it.”

 

“Shoot it.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

Jarrett walked off in the moonlight and returned with a fat river stone he had to hold in both hands. He got within six feet of that old rattler, shaking its tail for all it’s worth, and launched the stone at the snake, sending it writhing and turning with a broken back. He retrieved the rock and slammed it back down a half dozen times before the snake, bloody and broken, tried to coil and strike a final time, but only twitched on account of the nerves.

 

In the moonlight they watched Jarrett spit and try to catch his breath.

 

“Man can’t show anger toward nature,” Jones said in a whisper to White. “Any fool knows that. That’s what separates us.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

Monday, July 24, 1933

 

Okay, so the song went like this: Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller had robbed three banks since Kansas City, none of them worth squat, but the little stash growing into something neat and tidy, a figure to work with, something respectable, and a number that would be well worth telling the dealer, “I’m okay with this. I’m out.” They slept in cars and ate by cook fires. They turned their heads from friendly folks in restaurants who wanted to chat about the weather; they wore common clothes and drove common cars. Their lives, their futures, were road maps purchased for pennies at Texaco, Sinclair Oil, and Standard Red Crown service stations. They pissed in drainage ditches and fell asleep with whiskey bottles in their hands, often reaching for guns when a deer would scamper across places where they laid their heads. All in all, Harvey had been having a hell of a time since breaking out of jail. Everything was just that much sweeter.

 

“So if it’s good, why do we bring in Underhill and Clark?”

 

“Because we need more men,” Harvey said.

 

“Those hicks are the types that find a sexual interest in the barnyard.”

 

“Didn’t say I wanted to take them to dinner with us.”

 

“If they fuck up, we leave ’em or kill ’em.”

 

“You run a hard code, Verne.”

 

“You got more patience?”

 

Harvey shrugged. They stood over the hood of his Buick, parked at the edge of a rolling hill at the foot of the Cooksons, and studied the git out from Muskogee, the People’s National Bank. “Big beautiful cage on the left wall,” Harvey said. “Safe will be open for business behind them.”

 

“How many?”

 

“Eight and the president.”

 

“When?”

 

“Right before closing.”

 

“And then what?”

 

“I head back to my family,” Harvey said. “Wisconsin and all that. And you can go back to Vi.”

 

“Vi’s in New York.”

 

“Then you go to New York.”

 

“I think she’s fooling around on me.”

 

“You’d have to be pretty stupid to step out with Verne Miller’s gal.”

 

“We had some trouble before she left.”

 

“What kind of trouble?”

 

“She complained that I got a temper.”

 

Dust kicked up on the horizon, and a black speck soon took the shape of a sedan not unlike the black Ford they’d stolen in Clinton. “Mad Dog” Underhill and Jim Clark crawled out, and Harvey and Miller spoke to them. Harvey hadn’t seen the boys since the Lansing breakout. Underhill was a bony fella with big mean eyes and dirty little hands. Clark had no neck, thinning hair, and dimples. He was a fat man who shifted from side to side when he walked.

 

Cigarettes were smoked. The git shown to everyone there just in case Harvey was hit and couldn’t drive. Underhill laid down a sharp fart as he studied the map and didn’t even say he was sorry.

 

“I got some aigs and a skillet,” Underhill said, scratching his crotch.

 

“Stole some bread at the Piggly Wiggly,” Clark said, and spat.

 

“Fire’s over there, boys,” Harvey Bailey said, pointing to the little grouping of stones he’d laid out last night. “Help yourself.”

 

Verne Miller had walked off to the edge of a little hill where the earth had been blasted away to make room for train tracks. He carried with him a little bucket of water, a straight razor, and a mirror. Sitting on an old tree stump, he began to shave as the new boys guffawed it up by the fire.

 

“Don’t think about it so much,” Harvey said.

 

“Mad Dog? You got to be pulling my leg.”

 

“Vi.”

 

“You know, I met her at a carnival,” Verne said. “She was working in a kissing booth, and some rube tried to reach under her skirt and touch her pussy.”

 

“And you didn’t like that.”

 

“I nearly choked the man to death.”

 

Miller had shaven half his face with nothing but muddy water. The mud slid down off his cheek and into the bucket as he turned to stare at Harvey. He shook his head and slid the razor down his other cheek, the blade sounding like the soft ripping of a paper bag.

 

“Those morons know about Kansas City?” Miller asked.

 

“Nope.”

 

“The G’s gonna hang us for that,” Miller said. “You were right. Jelly Nash wasn’t worth it.”

 

“We weren’t there,” Harvey said. “Don’t ever tell yourself anything different.”

 

“People blame me for killing Nash.”

 

“Wasn’t your fault.”

 

“Underhill said he heard I killed Nash because he looked at me wrong.”

 

“Underhill doesn’t have much sense,” Harvey said.

 

“Why do they call him ‘Mad Dog’?”

 

“You really want to know?”

 

 

 

“MOR E COFFEE?” MRS. URSCHEL ASKED.

 

“I’d appreciate it, ma’am,” Gus Jones said.

 

She sent a negro boy back to the kitchen to refill the silver pot.

 

“I want you to go,” Mrs. Urschel said. “I want all these lawmen gone.”

 

“May I ask why?”

 

“No one will call with every policeman in the state in this house.”

 

“I’d like our people to stay.”

 

“From your office.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Jones said. “We don’t want to interfere.”

 

“Is Charlie dead?”

 

“No, ma’am.”

 

“Will they kill him?”

 

“I can’t rightly say.”

 

“But they might.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“Like the Lindbergh child.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“Mr. Urschel is a tough, resourceful man. He’s cunning and shrewd and quite strong. He can take care of himself.”

 

“I don’t doubt it, Mrs. Urschel.”

 

“Do I call you ‘Agent Jones’?”

 

“ ‘Buster’ is just fine.”

 

“Why do they call you Buster?”

 

“Just what I’ve always been called. My mother called me that.”

 

“Did she approve of your line of work?”

 

“She understood it,” Jones said. “My father was the same.”

 

“Worked for the government.”

 

“He was a lawman.”

 

She nodded. The negro waited until there was a pause in the conversation to pour the coffee into the china cups. The furniture was stiff and hard, the kind you’d seen in a museum but never used. A large portrait of Charles Urschel hung on a far wall over a small wooden bookshelf filled with leather-bound editions. Jones would be damned if it didn’t seem like old Charlie was staring dead at him.

 

“Agent Colvin said you knew my first husband.”

 

“I helped him out in a small matter sometime back.”

 

“Charles is much more reserved than Mr. Slick.”

 

“I imagine so.”

 

They drank more coffee. The house had an air-conditioning machine that groaned and hummed and let in refrigerated air while the press and police sat outside in a ninety-degree morning. They ran telephone lines to poles and hustled copy straight from desks fashioned from blocks and beams to downtown newsrooms. Earlier that day, Jones had chased off a grifter selling photographs of the Urschel family.

 

“Mr. Kirkpatrick said I can trust you.”

 

“You can.”

 

“And you are acquainted with him, too.”

 

“Through your first husband,” he said. “Kirk is a right fella.”

 

“He’s placed a great many calls on the family’s behalf. Some top newspaper editors will be withdrawing their people.”

 

“That’s good.”

 

“You don’t like them either.”

 

“Never cared for parasites of any kind.”

 

Berenice Urschel smiled at him, and the smile dropped as she craned her head to look at the gilded portrait of her kidnapped husband. She took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “He’ll be just fine.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

 

 

 

 

THE BANK TELLER LAY FLAT ON HER BACK, SUMMER DRESS HIKED above the knee, showing a good bit of stocking and garter. She was a looker, too. Lean and lanky, with red lips and marcelled hair, smelling just like sunshine to Harvey Bailey.

 

“Sweetie?” Harvey asked.

 

“Yes, sir?”

 

“Please, turn over,” he said.

 

The woman—whom Harvey had noted yesterday as Miss Georgia Loving—flipped, face reddened, but no less excited about the show.

 

“This is a robbery,” he said. “Not an audition.”

 

Women were often like that during a job. You offered a little politeness, some little gentlemanly presentation, and they’d work with you. It made the whole thing very safe and enjoyable for everyone.

 

He checked his Bulova. Four on the nose.

 

Harvey moved across the wide marble lobby—polished shoes clicking under him—and looked out the front-door window to see Verne Miller behind the wheel of a stolen flat-black Buick. Miller met his eyes and tipped his hat.

 

The street was clean. Two minutes to go.

 

“Done?” Harvey yelled, heading back behind the cages and scooping up great wads of cash and coin, filling a bag.

 

“Almost,” Clark called from inside the vault.

 

Underhill stood at the vault door, sweeping his 12-gauge across a dozen or so bank employees and anonymous suckers, face to floor with hands on their necks. He wore a great smile on his unshaven mug, a matchstick in the corner of his mouth, and Harvey knew the bastard was just itching to pull the trigger and let the buckshot fly.

 

“Head down,” Underhill said, jabbing the end of his gun into the bank president’s fat ass. “Or I blow you a new hole.”

 

“Easy, boy.”

 

“He moves again and I’ll kill him.”

 

“I know.”

 

“You don’t believe me? I’ll do it. I swear to Christ.”

 

“No need to do that.”

 

“Look at his fat apple cheeks. Just like a hog. If I had an apple—”

 

“Easy.”

 

The bank president hadn’t time to slip back into his coat, and his wide, fatty back was soaked in sweat. You could see the rolls rippling under linen, and his thinning hair had grown hot and matted against his head. Harvey could hear him breathing clear across the room.

 

He studied Underhill, knowing the goddamn buffoon had gone screwy again, just like when they broke out of Lansing and he wanted to slaughter Warden Prather just because authority made him itch. A loud clock ticked off the minutes, big black fans creaking overhead trying to sweep away the hundred-degree heat.

 

There was silence.

 

And then there was everything. Car engines and men yelling and boots clattering up the great steps to the bank door, rattling the lock.

 

“Who hit the alarm?” Underhill asked. “Goddamn you, Fat Man.” Harvey held up a hand to calm him and walked around to the cages, running a hand under the ledge and finding the small switch. He shrugged and took a breath.

 

“Ladies?”

 

Miss Loving and the other teller crooked their heads from the floor.

 

“Lucky girls,” he said. “Lucky, lucky little girls.”

 

The woman craned her neck at him. Harvey winked.

 

“You can be our hostesses.”

 

Harvey tossed the bag of cash at Underhill and offered a hand to each teller, hoisting them to their feet. The other gal’s name was Thelma, a blonde with a fine set of cantaloupe bosoms straining the material of her flowered dress. She hadn’t stopped smiling at Harvey since he pointed the gun in her face.

 

He placed the .38 in the waistband of his blue linen suit and put a palm to each of the women’s backs, ushering them to the door. Both of ’em took a deep breath, and the expanse and ripple of it felt like an electric current.

 

Underhill went first.

 

With a touch of a trigger, the blam sent the boys in blue behind their cars. Verne Miller—God bless that son of a bitch—held the Thompson over the Buick doorframe and trained it on the three police cars parked haphazardly on the street.

 

Underhill nodded. Harvey walked down the steps flanked by the two women, just kind of strolling with a Hollywood air.

 

Clark loaded the cash in the trunk. Underhill covered Miller, who cranked the engine, and Harvey gently escorted the ladies to the running boards, where he told them they better hold on real tight. As he ducked into the car, he heard a gunshot sounding, felt a white-hot stabbing pain in his heel, and he tumbled on inside and told Verne to get going fast.

 

Underhill squeezed the second trigger, and the women shrieked as the Buick sped away from the downtown. Harvey Bailey, leg hurting so bad it felt damn good, loved it, laughing and turning back only for a moment to see the cops trying to make chase of that big, beautiful Buick growling and downshifting into a comfortable, violent speed.

 

His heel bled thick and dark into his shoes, and he tied off the wound at the ankle with his necktie.

 

When they hit the county line, Verne Miller tossed a box of roofing nails from his window and fired up a Lucky, watching the blowouts in his rearview. For just a moment, through all that goddamn smoke, Harvey noted something on Miller’s lips that might’ve been a smile.

 

Harvey reached out the window with a bloody hand to give Miss Loving’s narrow little ass a nice pat. He knew damn well that the world was a fine place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

6

 

Kathryn didn’t see George again until twilight. He woke up from a whiskey slumber, scratching himself and coughing, and found his way out to the front porch of her stepdaddy Boss Shannon’s place. After taking a leak, he lit a cigarette and joined her on the stoop, watching that fire sun slipping down like a nickel into the slotted, flat land. She pulled the cigarette from his lips and offered him some of her gin. He took it because it was alcohol, but she knew he didn’t like it. George was the same as every boy she’d known back in Saltillo, Mississippi, who’d been weaned on whiskey.

 

“You want a quick poke?” he asked.

 

“Why don’t I poke you in the eye,” Kathryn said.

 

“Where’s Albert?”

 

“Boss wanted to show him his mule,” Kathryn said. “He claims it can count.”

 

“That mule can’t count,” George said. “Boss stands over your shoulder and nods his head to make the dang animal tap its hoof. That doesn’t take much sense.”

 

“I heard y’all had trouble.”

 

George shrugged.

 

“Albert said you ran out of gas.”

 

“Albert shoulda brought more gas.”

 

“Weren’t you watching the gauge?”

 

“You see many gas stations on those cat roads?”

 

“You shoulda thought ahead.”

 

“It worked out.”

 

“Can I see him?”

 

“No.”

 

She looked away and watched the sun a bit.

 

“Oh, hell,” George said. “Come on. Don’t go poutin’ on me. I’m too damn tired.”

 

They took the new Cadillac—the same one GMAC threatened to repossess if they didn’t make another payment—down a twisting dirt road, scattering up trails of thick Texas dust that coated the midnight blue paint with a fine powder, into the southeast corner of Boss’s place, where his son lived with his barefoot and pregnant teen bride. Armon came from the house when he heard the Buick and ran out to meet them, clopping along in unlaced brogans, big overalls covering his naked chest. He wore a big smile on his crooked face and opened the door for her, being more pleasant to her than when they first met, when his hick daddy and her stupid momma decided to make a go of it after meeting in the want ads. Back then, Armon used to try to peep at her through a crack in the bathroom wall. He was that kind of kid.

 

“Y’all did it,” Armon said. “You really pulled it off.”

 

George killed the engine and stood from the car, stretching and groaning, still feeling the long drive from the night before. He lit a cigarette and watched Armon from over the big hood of the Buick.

 

“What do you say, Potatoes.”

 

“Hey, George,” Armon said. “Whew. We got ’im all settled in and even brought him a can of beans. He won’t speak or nothin’. I guess he’s still kind of upset about y’all taking him. You think he might want a smoke or something? I read in the papers that fellas of his type like cigars. I could go to town and get him some smokes. He might like it. Or you think he’d like some of Boss’s ’shine? That might make him feel a little more rested and all.”

 

George looked to Kathryn.

 

“I think he’s fine with the beans,” Kathryn said. “Don’t make a fool of yourself in town. Just make sure he stays chained up, and you shut your goddamn mouth.”

 

She pushed Armon to the side, walking down the dirt path in her white kid T-straps, the stones making her walk a bit wobbly till she was on the porch and into the hot box. George was with her—she could feel his breathing on her neck—and she pushed through past a ratty sofa that had been her mother’s, a couple broken chairs, and an old organ stuffed in a corner. They didn’t have running water or electricity, but Armon had gone ahead and brought an organ home, sheet music and all, so he could buck-dance to hymns or whatever that boy liked.

 

George cocked his head to a door in the shack and creaked it open, and there he was—bigger than shit—eyes covered in cotton and tape, ears plugged and arms chained through a baby’s high chair. Kathryn looked at her big fat baby and smiled, not believing the lug had actually pulled it off. High-dollar oilman Charles Urschel bound and tied like a gift.

 

George put a finger to his lips and closed the creaky door, walking from the heat of the house and back onto the uneven, slatted porch. He lit a smoke and offered her one from his pack. He clicked open his silver lighter with a little snap of his fingers, and the ruby ring caught the last light of the day. He winked at her, smooth and cool as George R. Kelly could sometimes be.

 

“How come you’re dressed like that?” he asked.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You look like you came from a party.”

 

“I wasn’t at a party,” she said. “It’s just some frock.”

 

“One of the easiest jobs I ever pulled,” George said. “We get four more of these, Kit, and we’re on our way to South America.”

 

“Let’s get the money first.”

 

“Two hundred grand is nothing to people like this,” George said. “They’ll pay.”

 

“We’ll see.”

 

“They’ll pay.”

 

Armon stood by the Cadillac and ran his hands over the silver hood ornament, took out a rag from his overalls’ back pocket, and began to shine the winged lady. The wind blew grit into his greasy hair, and he didn’t even seem to take notice, just smiling up at the two of them like he sure couldn’t have been any prouder.

 

“Can we trust him?” George asked from the corner of his mouth.

 

“He’d eat pig shit for you.”

 

“Good to know.”

 

“And your momma?”

 

“She’d eat pig shit for a nickel.”

 

“We’ll have money, Kit. More money than we’ll know how to spend.”

 

“I doubt that,” she said.

 

Kathryn turned to George, wrapping her long arms around his neck. She leaned into him, letting herself go in a short fall, and he caught her and planted a big one on her. He reached his big hands around her waist and twirled her around, right there not ten paces from a pigsty and a shack, and kissed her on her ear and cheek and whispered to her that he’d really like to screw her on a big pile of money.

 

“I can’t think of anything I’d like better, doll.”

 

 

 

 

 

JONES SMOKED HIS PIPE FILLED WITH CHERRY TOBACCO, SITTING in the very wicker chair in which Charles Urschel had played bridge just two nights before. He thought it a pleasant summer night, wondering when the real contact would come and how it would come and how reasonable the bastards would be. The toughest thing about a kidnapping was sitting on your ass and waiting. Jones had never exhibited any talent for doing nothing.

 

“How will we know?” Mr. E. E. Kirkpatrick asked.

 

“It’ll be clear,” Jones said. “We’ll know.”

 

“Will it be a phone call?”

 

“Could be.”

 

“A telegram.”

 

“Could be written in tea leaves,” Jones said. “But you’ll know.”

 

Kirkpatrick was a thin man with a gaunt face and honest brown eyes; Jones thought he recalled something of the man being a newspaperman before joining up as a front man for Tom Slick. His seersucker suit rumpled, tie loosely knotted at the throat from travel, he had that rawboned look of a drinker, although Jones had never personally seen the man drunk. A straightforward fella, although a bit too much of a talker to Jones’s liking.

 

“This would’ve never happened in Europe,” Kirkpatrick said. “They are too civilized. Did you know that in England it’s a crime for a family to pay a ransom?”

 

“Is that what you think Mrs. Urschel should do? Not pay?”

 

Jones laid his Stetson crown down onto the table. He rolled his sleeves to the elbow and leaned in.

 

“We can’t let people like Charlie just be ripe for the picking. How’s an honest man supposed to live his life? Is a rich, successful man fair game for the masses? Does a man have to be surrounded by guards to take a nighttime stroll or go on an impromptu fishing trip?”

 

“I can’t tell the family what to do,” Jones said.

 

“But what would you do?”

 

“You mean if Mr. Urschel was my family?”

 

“Or if it were you?”

 

“If it were me, my wife wouldn’t give these people a plug nickel,” Jones said, smiling. “But that’s based on personal appraisal.”

 

“What if Charlie was your brother?”

 

“You think Mr. Urschel would pay?”

 

“I don’t think money is of concern to Mr. Urschel,” Kirkpatrick said. “Only the principle.”

 

“I believe a grown man being kidnapped is different than a child.”

 

“How do you figure?”

 

“The person who kidnapped Lindbergh’s child is a weakling suffering from some kind of illness. I’ve always believed that. That whole caper was sloppy. But the ones at work here are different animals; to them this is just a business transaction. Mr. Urschel is nothing more than a flesh-and-blood investment.”

 

“Like a prize steer?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“You helped out plenty when Mr. Slick had some trouble.”

 

“A man’s business should be a man’s business. Not ammunition.”

 

“Mr. Slick was much obliged.”

 

“How ’bout we read that letter again?”

 

The house was as still and quiet as Jones had known it since his arrival, a vacuum devoid of sound that he couldn’t quite place. There were police on the premises and agents in the kitchen and stationed in the salon. But the work had subsided, many of the men just drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and keeping watch on the Urschel family while they all waited for some kind of legitimate contact from the kidnappers. Kirkpatrick coughed and picked up the typed sheets that had been telegrammed to the mansion.

 

“ ‘Mr. F. Urschel is fairing well but don’t sleep, a trifel nervose.’ Whoever this is could use a remedial course in spelling and grammar. They spelled ‘trifle’ wrong, and ‘nervous,’ too, and ‘location’ in the next sentence. Are all criminals this stupid?”

 

“Keep going,” Jones said, drawing on his pipe. Somehow sitting in Urschel’s seat gave him some kind of perspective and feel for how it would unfold, or at least some kind of feel for the man. He wanted to know if Charles F. Urschel was the kind of man to take it or fight it. Or somewhere in between.

 

“ ‘Locashun of myself will be revealed in the next notice after I see your deci-shun in the newspaper.’ ‘Decision’ spelled the same way,” Kirkpatrick said. “ ‘Mr. Urschel’s release can be secured at small cost and without BLOODSHED.’ They typed ‘bloodshed’ in capital letters. ‘If you follow my instructions, map I will enclose to you at once after I see your ad.’ ”

 

“Read the part about the ad again,” Jones said, taking another puff. “From the beginning.”

 

“ ‘Note you are the go between for the family of Chas. F. Urschel. If so, I can tell you where they are holding him. I will reveal the facts to you if you wish or either reveal them to the detective department.’ Good Lord, nobody can be this stupid on purpose.”

 

Jones listened and smoked some more, watching the smoke kind of hang there in the dull night heat. It had been more than a hundred that afternoon, and the heat didn’t seem to want to leave. This was the fourth letter they’d received that day. All of ’em just as phony, but you didn’t dismiss a single one. You take one ransom lightly and chances are that would be your number.

 

“ ‘But I would suggest you in as much as I thank you’—I believe they meant ‘think’—‘should know and then you could tell whom you wished. If you want this information, signify the same by run add in Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Teligram.’ ‘Telegram’ spelled, of course, as ‘I-G-R-A-M.’ ”

 

“Chislers,” Jones said. “Fakes.”

 

“Surely not scholars.”

 

“That doesn’t matter a lick,” Jones said. “The writer there hadn’t thought through any plan at all. The boys we’re dealing with here are pretty shrewd, businesswise, and will have a plan in place. Did you meet that four-flusher today? The one who called himself a ‘medium of the psychic arts’? He said he’d try and get in touch with Mr. Urschel’s spirit, and Mrs. Urschel asked what if he wasn’t dead, and the fella just kind of looked at her, holding his hand out for some kind of payment, not really having an idea what to do next.”

 

“Does it always work like this?”

 

“They come out of the woodwork, Kirk,” Jones said. “This world has no shortage of shitbrains.”

 

“You want another nip in your coffee?”

 

“Better be getting back to the Skirvin,” Jones said, tapping the burnt tobacco from his pipe and reaching for his Stetson. “It’s nearly midnight.”

 

He pulled his father’s gold watch from his vest and looked back into the mansion’s long hallway, studying the open space.

 

“The clocks have stopped,” Kirkpatrick said. “Is that what you were listening for? Charlie wound them every Sunday.”

 

“This house is quieter than a tomb.”

 

“Sometimes you miss the tick,” he said.

 

They were quiet for a moment in the silence, and Jones tapped some ash that had fallen onto his hat brim.

 

“I think the doctor finally got Berenice to take a shot,” Kirkpatrick said.

 

“She hadn’t slept since they took him. I believe she loves that man in a way that she never felt for Mr. Slick.”

 

“Maybe I’ll take that nip.”

 

“I’m sure glad they sent for you, Buster,” Kirkpatrick said.

 

“Glad to help.”

 

“Even with fakes and chislers?”

 

“’Specially with them.”

 

 

 

 

 

THEY DIVIDED THE LOOT BY THE CAMPFIRE. UNDERHILL, WITH that bony face and big eyes, watching Verne Miller peeling off every bill, stacking every coin on a rock, till they’d come to a shy more than eight grand. Not exactly the Denver Mint job, but not a bad haul, and Harvey was fine with the whole deal, itching to get into a nice hotel, slip that shot-up leg into a bath, and have people bring him things with the jingle of the phone.

 

“Count it again,” Underhill said.

 

“It’s there,” Miller said.

 

Oh, shit.

 

“We’re missing a bag.”

 

“What went into that trunk came out of the trunk, and it’s all right there,” Harvey said. “Get what you got and let’s all get gone.”

 

“We’re missing a bag.”

 

Miller stood from the pile of money and placed his hands on his hips, standing tall and looking a bit like that old war hero. He just stared down at the grease-parted hair of Underhill and the pudgy face of Jim Clark, chawing away on a wad of tobacco, the way a man studies an animal in a zoo, with kind of a detached curiosity, waiting to see what they’ll do next.

 

“Two per man,” Miller said. “Plus some change.”

 

Miller screwed a cigarette into the center of his mouth and set fire to it. He wore his pants very high and had tucked the cuffs into knee-high boots.

 

“Why’d you bring him in, Harvey?” Underhill asked. “You gone soft? Everybody knows this fella ain’t got no morals. He kills people for dough.”

 

Verne Miller smiled at that and rubbed his movie-star jaw. He glanced over at Harvey, and Harvey had to stifle a grin.

 

“When would we have stashed the money?” Harvey asked.

 

“I’m not calling you out, Harv,” Underhill said. “Me and Jim was the one did the heavy lifting while you was supervisin’. Your man didn’t lift a dang finger. And now we come up a few grand short, this just ain’t on the level.”

 

Jim Clark brought his eyes up to Miller and then over at Underhill. He had a stick he’d taken from the edge of the fire and was drawing patterns in the rough earth.

 

“Why don’t you apologize, you damn moron,” Harvey said. “You want to break up a gang before it starts?”

 

“We was a gang in Lansing,” Clark said, more of a mumble than words. And Harvey watched him go over and over that dirt line like he had to convince himself that it was there.

 

“I need a bath,” Harvey said. “I need a cigar, a fresh change of clothes, and to get this bullet out of me. I need a woman. But what I don’t need is a bunch of monkey business and horseshit.”

 

Verne Miller drew a gun.

 

“Go ahead, you sideshow freak,” Underhill said.

 

“Come on,” Harvey said.

 

Miller kicked the cash and coin into the fire, and the money started to smolder and burn. He clenched his jaw and slid the gun back into his belt. Sparks flew up from the little campfire, and Clark and Underhill didn’t move, mouths open, until it all registered into their small brains, and Underhill reached his hand into the smoldering money and pulled out charred bills, yipping and blowing on his fingers, until he thought he’d felt the weight of four grand and backed away from the sparks and heat.

 

He clutched the money to his chest and called Verne Miller a crazy son of a bitch, and Miller just kind of smiled at him and shrugged. Clark and Underhill counted off the money and gathered their things.

 

“No hard feelings,” Harvey said.

 

“I don’t take issue with you, Harv,” Underhill said. “You broke us out and a man don’t forget somethin’ like that.”

 

Harvey shook both men’s hands, agreeing on a Joplin pool hall to make contact, and Underhill and Clark drove off quick into the darkness and far down the meandering open road.

 

“Did you have to go and do that?” Harvey asked. “I think you hurt Mad Dog’s feelings.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Because they called you a liar?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That’s a hard code, Verne.” Harvey got down to his knees and counted out the money that hadn’t been burned up.

 

“How’s that heel?”

 

“Bleeding like a bastard. I’m cashing out of this shit. I’m done.”

 

“How much you got squirreled away?”

 

Harvey didn’t answer, as he turned his back to Miller and kicked dirt over the fire until it was just smoke off the ashes.

 

“I’ll drive,” Verne Miller said, already headed to the Buick. “Where’s that farm you told me about? Kit Kelly’s folks’ place?”

 

“Town called Paradise.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

7

 

Berenice Urschel was gone. According to the maid, she’d been seen climbing out a second-story window and shimmying down a rose trellis before making a break for the garage. A couple newspapermen saw her get in a Hudson touring car that sure looked a hell of a lot like E. E. Kirkpatrick’s machine, although no one seemed to note the man behind the wheel. And so Jones stayed up waiting till damn-near eleven o’clock, like an old father worried that his daughter might lose her virginity in the heat of a summer evening. He was standing in the drive by the garage when they finally rolled back to the mansion, dimming their lights and crawling from the Hudson with long faces.

 

“Good evening,” Jones said.

 

“We couldn’t take the chance and tell you,” Kirkpatrick said.

 

“Tell me what?” Jones asked, Berenice Urschel not yet looking him in the eye.

 

“They asked for five thousand dollars and not to tell a soul,” she said, soft-like. “They said they’d bring his watch to prove it.”

 

“You get the watch?” Jones asked.

 

Kirkpatrick plucked his hands into his trousers and pulled out a wrist-watch, handing it to Jones.

 

“Ain’t even a watch,” Jones said. “The damn hands have been painted on.”

 

“We couldn’t take a chance,” Berenice said. “You’d have stopped us.”

 

“I wouldn’t have stopped you,” Jones said. The evening was alive with a radio’s music coming from a neighbor’s window, and crickets, and the continuous clicking from newspapermen on the dewy lawn, hammering out editorials on the kidnapping and updates on how Charles F. Urschel, Oklahoma City oilman, was still in the hands of the kidnappers, federal agents baffled.

 

“Makes you angry, don’t it?” Jones said.

 

Berenice walked past Jones and onto the worn path the kidnappers had taken and through the screen door of the back porch. The door slammed, and she sat in a chair with the lights off and just stared out into the empty darkness.

 

“The less said—” Kirkpatrick said.

 

“I don’t intend to punish the woman,” Jones said. “But five thousand is a lot of money.”

 

“They only got a thousand.”

 

“What did these chislers look like?”

 

“I don’t know,” Kirkpatrick said. “I drove her out to the corner of Broadway and Main. They told her to come alone, and so I let her out. She went into a chop suey joint called the New Bamboo right next to Branson’s cigar shop.”

 

“You see anyone leave the place?”

 

“They must’ve taken a back door,” he said. “When Berenice came out, she was crying. They’d taken her pocketbook and handed her that fake watch.”

 

“They rough her up?”

 

“Just scared her to death.”

 

The men heard the telephone ring from inside the Urschels’ house. A servant appeared on the back porch and called to Mrs. Urschel in the darkness. After a while she emerged through the porch doorway and walked to the men, the sadness replaced with the woman gritting her teeth. “The language. I can’t even repeat what I was just called.”

 

“Who?” Kirkpatrick asked.

 

“That filthy bastard who took my money,” she said. “He had the nerve to call here and complain that I shortchanged him after he didn’t produce Charles’s watch. I am just a fool. An absolute fool.”

 

“No, ma’am,” Jones said. “I’d say that filthy bastard’s the fool. We can find out right quick where he made that call and get your money back.”

 

“Vultures,” Kirkpatrick said. “Parasites.”

 

“Opportunists,” Jones said. “You mind if I take that watch, ma’am?”

 

 

 

 

 

THE PAIN HAD BECOME FAMILIAR AND AT LEAST BEARABLE. Charlie would sit in the same position for hours, back to the wall, left arm stretched up in chains to the high chair, listening to the sounds of the farm, for most surely it was a farm, with the rooster and goats, a pig or two, the squeak of an old well, and an old tin cup presented to him with water that tasted of minerals and rust. They did not talk to him, although he tried. He’d comment on the day and the time and how things were awful hot, but there was only the unlocking of the chain and movement to another section of the house, away from the sun, away from the west, and to another part of the old shack, with the creaky floorboards and the smell of dirty clothes and dirty dishes and pig shit.

 

That morning he’d been given a breakfast of canned tomatoes and canned beans with a tin of cold campfire coffee. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, would you?”

 

No reply.

 

“You get dust storms?” he asked.

 

“That’s down south,” said an old man. “Oklahoma and Texas.”

 

“You got the time?”

 

“Yes, sir,” said a young man.

 

“Don’t see any harm in you tellin’ me.”

 

“Better check.”

 

“You got to check with someone to tell a fella the time?”

 

“I don’t have to check with nobody.”

 

“Hush up,” said the old man.

 

The boy returned to the room alone, hours after sundown, Charlie hearing his feet on the slats, and told him it was close to midnight. The hours went like that, although Charlie rarely dozed. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Mr. Urschel.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“You want a spot of ’shine?”

 

“I’d like to use the facilities before I sleep. Is that okay? Or should you ask?”

 

The young man unlocked him from the high chair and bound the chains tighter at the wrist, checking the manacles on his legs. The boy prodded Charlie on with what he took for the butt of a shotgun, and would tell him to turn here and there, and then grabbed his elbow as they came to the porch and some rickety steps, Charlie nearly tripping over a baying hound awoken from sleep.

 

The outhouse smelled like a thousand outhouses he’d known, hastily slapped together in the oil fields, but he never had grown used to the stench. He was able to unlatch his pants and sit, and, with his hands loose, play a bit with the tape over his eyes, loosening the cotton a bit and readjusting, moonlight flooding through the cutout in the door. Tattered catalog images of women in their brassieres and slips had been tacked to the leaning walls, and old corncobs were placed in a box at his feet. Flies buzzed from the carved wooden seat and echoed deep within the hole and in the stench of it all, and Charlie Urschel began to plan his escape.

 

When he finished, with the cotton loose from his eyes, he unlatched the outhouse door and stumbled before the boy. He could see him now through the slits. A short, squatty fella with grease-parted hair and wearing a pair of Union overalls. The 12-gauge looked to have rusted shut long ago.

 

The boy reached in the overalls’ flap and pulled out a cigar. He placed it into Charlie’s hands and asked if he’d like him to light her up. Charlie said, “Sure, why not?,” and so the boy struck a couple matches and waited until the cigar got going.

 

Charlie stretched his legs and took in the layout of the little shack, the small hogpen and chicken coop. He saw the old well with a bucket, and in the far distance, perhaps a mile, he saw the lights of another house.

 

“How does she smoke, Mr. Urschel?”

 

“Thank you just the same,” Charlie said. “But not my brand.”

 

The boy remained sullen all the way back into the shack, where he told Charlie to change into a pair of pajamas. Charlie got settled back against the wall where he could get chained up for the night.

 

“Just how much of a cut are you gettin’, son?”

 

 

 

 

 

THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS PLACED FROM A SINCLAIR OIL FILLING station just across the Canadian River bridge west of the city. Jones interviewed the proprietor of the station near midnight, and the man told him right quick that it had been a couple beggars from down in Hooverville who’d made the call, even bumming the nickel from a customer. The man gave him a fair description of the two, and Jones told Berenice Urschel to wait at the station or he could call an agent to pick her up.

 

“I want to go with you.”

 

“No, you don’t.”

 

“You bet I do,” she said. “I can pick him out.”

 

Jones looked away from the gas pumps toward the oil-drum fires burning among the lean-tos and clapboard shelters. You could smell the stink and shit and cook fires even through the cut of gasoline.

 

“I won’t have it.”

 

“Then I’ll go myself.”

 

Berenice Urschel was already halfway across the highway following a rutted road into the camp when Jones caught up with her. He didn’t say a word as they were swallowed into the wall-to-wall dwellings, women washing laundry in galvanized tubs, nursing babies, and cooking bottom-feeding fish across small fires. A latrine had been dug along the roadway that wound its way to the river where the chamber pots and rotten food had been dumped. The smell was something to behold, and Jones covered his face several times with a handkerchief he pulled from his shirt pocket.

 

Standing high on the hill, you could see the tin roofs—hundreds of them—gleaming silver in the full moon. The Canadian River moved slow and sluggish in the crook of the bend.

 

“They live like animals,” Berenice Urschel said.

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Jones said. “Every city’s got one.”

 

“I never read of this place.”

 

“Ain’t a good postcard for the Chamber.”

 

“Where do they come from?”

 

“The country,” he said. “Nowhere else to go, you head to the city, looking for work.”

 

“But women and children,” she said. “This just isn’t decent.”

 

“These days, it’s what we got.”

 

Jones followed Mrs. Urschel, who stumbled for a moment, holding on to some rusted sheet metal and making a big, clanging racket. A tall, skeletal figure appeared from the lean-to and thrust a sharpened stick at Jones. “Who is it?”

 

The boy’s eyes were the color of spoiled milk. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip.

 

“Looking for someone.”

 

“Who are you?”

 

“Just looking,” Jones said again.

 

The boy reached out and touched the soft cotton of Jones’s suit jacket and moved his fingers across the side where he kept the thumb buster. He stepped back, “You the law?”

 

“I’m the law.”

 

“You gonna burn us out again?”

 

“Just looking for a couple hustlers that took this woman’s money.”

 

“Wasn’t me.”

 

“Didn’t say it was.”

 

Berenice hadn’t said a word, fascinated by the young boy with the milky eyes. Almost in a trance, she glanced down to see her hand had been cut on the sheet metal, and she stared at it with awe as the drops ran down the length of her arm and twisted back to her elbow. Jones thrust the white handkerchief into her hand and clenched her fingers inward to make a fist.

 

“What happened?” she asked. “Where are your eyes?”

 

“These is my eyes,” the boy said. “Got caught in a duster. I seen it from forever. You just noticed a line of it, just a line of ink on paper, and then it got thicker and grew till you saw it as a flood. Daylight all ’round you. Birds started to get nervous, animals turning in circles.”

 

“You with your people?” Jones asked.

 

“Daddy’s gone to find work,” he said. “Mama’s dead.”

 

Jones nodded. “C’mon,” he said, Berenice standing still.

 

“I tried to make it back,” the boy said. “I thought we was in End-Times. I covered up my mouth with a rag, but my ears were plugged, and no matter how tight I shut my eyes that dang grit worked in there. Couldn’t hear nothin’. Couldn’t feel nothin’. I thought I was dead, laying there tasting the dirt, already buried and gone, and I wondered if this wadn’t what God had planned for us, that heaven wadn’t no reward but the taste of dirt and knowing it.”

 

“You’re fortunate to be alive,” Berenice Urschel said. “God’s will.”

 

“That storm wadn’t made by no God of mine.”

 

Jones knew these people, how they lived and scavenged. Only most of them he’d known were down in Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, people burned off their land and out of work, fighting over a pot of beans or milk from a goat. He’d seen human beings turned to pack animals during the Revolution, and this country was being torn apart in the same way, suffering plagues he’d only heard about in a sermon, wandering in the desert and searching for something solid to believe.

 

Berenice staggered for a moment, re-dressing her wound. And she focused on the boy, her expression righting on her face, determined, and saying, “Well, I don’t have any money.”

 

“I don’t need no money,” he said. “We got everything a man could need right here. Fish and loaves to feed us all.”

 

She touched his face, holding it within her hands adorned with jeweled rings and shiny bracelets. The jewels winked in the firelight, and Jones thought they’d be lucky if they got out of this shithole without a fight. But they walked on, down the sliding hill and toward the banks of the Canadian River, where a group of men stood around an oil-drum fire and sang old hobo songs and buck-danced. One man played a guitar, another a harmonica, the rest singing about the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and having a hell of a time.

 

The men in tattered clothes had fashioned a grill from an oil drum and cooked fat T-bones above the flames while passing bottles of bonded whiskey back and forth between verses about your birthday coming around once a week and it being Christmas every day. The men, six of them, were so caught up in the drunkenness that they didn’t even see the lady and old man in a cowboy hat walk close to the firelight.

 

Berenice Urschel just stared at one, the one tipping back the bottle and high-stepping it, and nodded in recognition.

 

Jones nodded back and stepped close enough to the fire to feel the warmth on his face and to hear the hissing of fat dripping from the grill. The guitar stopped on a dime and the harmonica softly petered out. The men shuffled a bit and then circled around Jones. The man with the whiskey bottle ambled up to him and gritted what few teeth he had in his rotten hole of a mouth.

 

“Y’all living high on the hog,” Jones said. “T-bones and bourbon. Fine ole night in the Hooverville, ain’t it?”

 

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, tipping back the whiskey bottle. He was unshaven, dressed in rags, with the breath of the dead. He polished off the bourbon, Adam’s apple sweaty and stubbled, bobbing up and down as he took the last swallow.

 

When he saw Mrs. Urschel, he broke the bottle on the grill, sparks scattering, and pointed the bottom directly at Jones’s chest. “You shore are a fat little fella. Like a little hog.”

 

Another bum snatched Berenice Urschel’s arm and twisted it up behind her back. “Take them rings off,” he said, nuzzling his mouth into her ear. “Them things are bigger ’an a cat’s-eye. You shoulda never come lookin’.”

 

The broken bottle refracted hard and silver in the fire glow as the hobo lunged for Jones’s belly. He sidestepped it easy, and the two men circled each other, the old hobo licking his dry lips. Jones reached for the .45 and aimed dead center at the man’s forehead.

 

“Y’all got ten seconds to hand over this woman’s money.”

 

“We ain’t got it.”

 

“Decent people live here,” Jones said. “And the shit runs downhill.” Jones took a breath and walked forward, gun loose by his side, and went straight up to the man gripping Berenice Urschel’s arm. He simply coldcocked the bastard across the temple.

 

The bum fell to his ass, clutching his face and moaning.

 

Jones pointed the gun at the hobo with the busted bottle and eyed down the barrel, squeezing the trigger just slightly, the cylinder buckling and flexing.

 

The man spit in Jones’s face, and Jones wiped it from his cheek with the back of his hand. He stepped forward and placed the revolver’s tip flat into the man’s nose.

 

The bum waited a minute, breathing hard and sullen, before reaching down and plucking a fat wad of bills from inside a busted boot. He nearly lost his balance, trying to stand tall before Jones but uneasy on drunk feet. “You can’t grudge a man for trying to go on the tit.”

 

“Open your mouth,” Jones said.

 

He opened his ragged hole, and Jones smelled a latrine of dead shrimp and whiskey and garbage. Jones pulled the broken watch from his breast pocket and set it on the man’s fat tongue. He sucker punched him in the gut, dropping the bastard to his ass, hitting him again in the mouth, breaking the timepiece into shards of glass and busted gears.

 

“All is forgiven,” Jones said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

8

 

Kathryn didn’t get up till almost eleven, worn out from the drive back and forth to Coleman and Paradise. She made a pot of coffee, grabbed her cigarette case, and took old Ching-A-Wee out for a doo-doo on her front lawn. How Kathryn loved that little dog. Lots of folks—including George—didn’t realize Ching-A-Wee was royalty. That’s God’s truth. When she and George had just gotten hitched in Saint Paul and lived in that awful apartment building with Verne Miller and Vi, there’d been an old maid who’d sold Pekingese on the second floor. Kathryn loved Chingy from the start. You could tell he was royal from the way he stood, begged for food, and, hell, even took a dump, legs sprawled and looking you dead in the eye, daring you to tell him it don’t smell sweet.

 

He skittered up the porch steps and, as she settled into a chair, onto her lap, nearly spilling coffee on the robe’s monkey-fur trim. She smoked for a while, stood and checked the mail slot—loaded down with nothing but bills and more bills. The department stores were the worst, always addressing you like this was something personal and not a business transaction, calling her “Mrs. Kelly” and telling her how “unfortunate” it was they hadn’t received a payment. The hell of it was, there was nothing unfortunate about it. She and George had blown through that Tupelo money damn-near Christmas, and if Mr. Urschel’s family didn’t come through she’d be back to making fifty cents an hour cutting men’s nails, complimenting fat old duddys on their style just to make a dollar tip or get an invite back to their hotels to make twenty bucks a throw.

 

“Hey, watch it,” she told Chingy. “Settle down. Settle down, little man.”

 

She raked her nails over the nape of his neck and felt for the diamond collar, wondering how much she could pawn it for if things got really rough. Her bags were packed and plans made. She knew every step by heart. She would meet George in Oklahoma City, bring the new Cadillac, telegram to Saint Paul . . . Hot damn, he’d done it. She didn’t think he could, but George Kelly had done it.

 

She’d nearly counted off the list for the second time when the gray Chevrolet rolled into her drive and killed the motor, Ed Weatherford stepping from the cab and taking off his hat. “Mornin’.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

“That ain’t no way to greet a gentleman caller.”

 

“What if George was here?”

 

“I’d sit down and chaw the fat with him,” he said. “George knows we’re buddies.”

 

“Some buddy.”

 

“What are you sore at, darlin’?” He gave that crooked, two-dollar grin. “Did you want moonlight and roses? I can look in my pocket.”

 

“I know what’s in your pocket.”

 

She stood and opened the screen door to let Chingy in. Ed followed the walkway, and Kathryn turned, pulling arms across her chest, the cigarette still burning in her fingers. “If you came here for a throw, I ain’t in the mood.”

 

“You are mighty mistrustful this morning.”

 

“Well, did you or didn’t you?”

 

“Aw, well.”

 

“Nerts.”

 

“Listen, doll,” Ed said, standing at the foot of the steps and mawing at his hat.

 

Kathryn stayed flat-footed on the porch and let him stammer.

 

“There’s been some rumors and questions, and I thought I’d be coming out here personal-like and see if there was any truth to them.”

 

“Please.”

 

“Darlin’, just listen to me. Isn’t that what you wanted from me the other night? Keep an ear open? Well, here I am. So don’t throw water in my face. I just wanted to know if George was involved with that oilman business.”

 

“What oilman business?”

 

“Shoot,” Ed said. He looked down at his pointed boots and let out a deep breath. “Hadn’t we all had a good time? Me, you, and George—hadn’t we shared some laughs? And now you won’t even be straight with me for me to help you.”

 

“I’ve been to visit my mother, Mrs. Ora Shannon.”

 

“I didn’t ask where you been, baby. I asked what about George.”

 

“George had business.”

 

“Selling Bibles?”

 

“Good-bye.”

 

Kathryn picked up her stack of bills, leaving her coffee, cigarette, and morning paper on the porch, and turned to the house. The screen door almost thwacked shut before Ed stuck his big fat foot in the threshold and grinned at her through the screen.

 

She waited.

 

He reached down and picked up the Daily Oklahoman from the porch floor by her coffee that continued to steam, red-lipped cigarette on the saucer.

 

“Good likeness of him,” Ed said. “I seen him speak one time at the Texas Oilmen’s Association. Seems like somebody would’ve seen them two fellas with machine guns. Say, does George still got—”

 

“Take it up with him.”

 

Ed made a real jackass show of folding up the newspaper all nice and neat and tucking it back near the coffee cup, saucer, and cigarette. “I can tell your nerves are a bit jangled this morning, and I can see you don’t have any sugar to give. I understand. But what you got to know, Mrs. Kelly, is that I knowed this is George’s work and I knowed why you were asking me about back doors and legal questions the other night. I didn’t figure it was for my good looks.”

 

Kathryn poked out her hip and placed a hand to it, thinking Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. “Are we finished?”

 

“Don’t think you need me now the deal is done,” he said. “The world can go sour on you anytime. You remember that, baby.”

 

She just looked through the screen at Ed Weatherford and waited for the goddamn, unfunny punch line coming from that goddamn, crooked mouth.

 

“I want a cut, Mrs. Kelly,” Ed said. “And this ain’t a request.”

 

 

 

 

 

“‘A-TRACTIONS OF THE ASTOUNDING NATURE, THE BI-ZARRE, THE start-ling and new in entertainment have been gathered from all parts of the universe to make The Midway—City of a Million Lights the z-z-zenith of amusement for all thrill seekers,’” the boy said. “Mr. Urschel, what does that word mean? ‘Zenith’?”

 

“Means ‘the highest point,’ son.”

 

“Holy smokes,” the boy said. “This must be somethin’ else. You want me to keep goin’?”

 

“You have plans to make the Fair?”

 

“Do I?” he asked. “Hold on a sec, and I’ll keep on readin’. ‘Located centrally on the World’s Fair grounds in Chicago, just south of Twenty-third Street, the many features of this outlay will satisfy even the oldest youngster that visits the Exposition.’ You know, they’re calling this thing ‘Century of Progress.’ That’s a heck of a thing, ain’t it? A whole dang century in one place? I got to see this. You want me to keep going or you want me to read them Ladies’ Home Journals to you? They got a story in there about Will Rogers that tickled me plenty. He sure is a pistol.”

 

“I’m so glad.”

 

“Mr. Urschel,” the boy said. “You know I don’t mean nothin’ by chainin’ you up and makin’ you eat beans out of a can. I don’t get no pleasure out of it.”

 

“You could let me go.”

 

The boy laughed.

 

“What’s so funny?”

 

“They’d kill me.”

 

“Who would?”

 

“You just messin’ with my mind now,” he said. “I was told I can read to you but better not talk. So let me go on . . . ‘Among the mul-multitudinous features are the many breathtaking rides, an Oriental village with exotic and colorful presentations of the life, rites, and customs of the Far East, a reproduction of African jungles and deserts, its queer villages, its ancient art and weird ceremonies, and “Bozo.”’ I think Bozo is some kind of monkey. A relation of mine just got back from Chicago and said they got some foreign dancers who don’t wear a stitch of clothes. The women’s titties jumpin’ up and down got to be worth the price of a ticket.”

 

“You wouldn’t happen to have another cigar on you?”

 

“I can git one,” he said. “Hit wouldn’t be trouble atall. Thought you said it wadn’t your brand.”

 

“It’s not. But I can enjoy it just the same.”

 

“Yes, sir. Hold on, Mr. Urschel. Hold on.”

 

“I don’t think I have a choice.”

 

Charlie was handcuffed to the bed frame in stiff pajamas he’d worn for days, and, considering it was midday, he felt downright ridiculous. His arm had fallen asleep shortly after he’d been chained and would take nearly an hour to come alive when they’d move him room to room away from the sun’s heat. He heard the front screen door thwack close and heavy feet in the main room and coming closer.

 

The door flew open and two men stepped inside.

 

“Keys.”

 

A jangle, and heavy shoes moved toward him. A snick, and his dead arm dropped to his side.

 

“Up, Urschel,” said the big gunman who’d brought him to this wretched hole. Charlie was pushed into the next room, and a heavy hand sat him down hard in a chair. “We’re gonna take off the tape, but don’t turn around and look at us. I really don’t feel like killing you today.”

 

They ripped the tape from his eyes, and the brightness of the room blinded him in a white glow. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, the skin feeling wet and soft and raw around the edges.

 

The big gunman plunked down a cheap paper tablet and a pen on the desk. “Write,” the other gunman said. “You can choose who gets the letter. But you tell them we mean business and we want two hundred grand.”

 

Charlie Urschel didn’t feel like it, but he laughed like a hiccup escaping his belly. He didn’t mean it, but the whole idea was just kind of funny to him, the number so absurd that he wondered how they came up with it. “I don’t have—”

 

“Shut up and write, Charlie,” said the big gunman, Charlie recalling his fat, bullish neck.

 

A thick hand shoved the pen into his fingers, and he caught a glance of a ruby pinky ring on a hairy finger.

 

Concentrating on the paper and into the glare, Charlie worked about ten minutes constructing the letter to his business associate, E. E. Kirkpatrick. Kirk had handled his affairs for some time and would understand his tone and message beyond these men’s obvious mental limits.

 

A man over his shoulder with hot breath read it and then ripped it up.

 

“Let’s try again,” the big man said. “I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the condition of the Slick Company or what assets you got tied up in stocks and bonds and whatnot. Just say you want the money paid, and we’ll handle the rest. Don’t think, Charlie. Just write, and smilin’ days are ahead.”

 

“The estate’s money is in a trust. You just can’t cash a check. There are lawyers and procedures—”

 

“Fuck ’em,” the other man said. “Write. Don’t think. Thinkin’ is our job.”

 

Charlie wrote what the man said, word for word. He heard the man’s heavy breathing and even the wet snap of a smile behind him when Charlie signed his name to all this nonsense. No words were said; the gunmen simply left the shack, screen door banging behind them, and a big motor started outside, automobile scratching off in the dust.

 

“Mr. Urschel, we sure are sorry,” said the old man. “Potatoes, get dinner started.”

 

“Sorry, Mr. Urschel,” the boy, Potatoes, said. “I got another cigar for you, a gen-u-ine Tampa Nugget. And we got somethin’ special for dinner tonight, too.”

 

“That’s right, Mr. Urschel. A real home-cooked meal. Don’t mind those men none. We just want you real comfortable. Remember, we’s the ones who treat you nice.”

 

“Then why don’t you let me go?” Charlie asked. “I’ll pay you both ten thousand dollars apiece.”

 

Potatoes and the old man didn’t say a thing for a long while. The hound trotted over and licked Charlie’s hands while the cotton and tape was laid back over his eyes from behind. The dog slopped on his fingers, and Charlie could feel the long, drooping ears.

 

“That ole boy sure does like you,” the old man said. “He don’t come ’round to people so quick. He senses you’re a gentleman. A just man.”

 

“You should see him take after a coon,” Potatoes said. “You want to hear more about the Fair?”

 

“No, thank you, if you please.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Potatoes said.

 

“Mr. Urschel,” the old man said. “If them boys don’t make it through what they’re plannin’ on, you have my word I’ll let you loose. I know you don’t know me. But my word is fourteen carat.”

 

“I bet,” Charlie said. “I could tell you’re a pair of real gentlemen.”

 

“I’ll go fetch your dinner,” Potatoes said. “I think I seen a Photoplay, too. Jean Harlow’s on the cover and gives an interview, real personal, saying things she ain’t said to nobody else before. I get the goose pimples just thinkin’ on it.”

 

 

 

 

 

“DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE HIM SWALLOW THE DAMN WATCH?” DOC White asked.

 

“They put that woman through hell,” Jones said. “Then he tried to slice me with a busted bottle.”

 

“Why didn’t you have them arrested?”

 

“They learned their lesson,” Jones said. “I hope they choked on their steak.”

 

“Pretty stupid calling Mrs. Urschel to complain.”

 

“Greedy as hell,” Jones said. “Those men were bums before the Depression. It just makes ’em easier to hide.”

 

“No shame atall these days.”

 

“Why don’t you tell that to Mr. Colvin?”

 

“Come again?”

 

“That little girl is twistin’ him in knots,” Jones said.

 

On a stone patio behind the mansion, Betty Slick wore a satin number, something worth a month’s pay to Jones, low-cut and tied at the shoulders. Jones had seen such numbers in magazines but never on Mary Ann. Mary Ann was no prude but would’ve thought paying that kind of money for a dress was a sin on the order of buying a bonnet you only wear on Easter Sunday. Bruce Colvin sat on the ledge of a marble fountain, felt hat in hand, conversing with the girl, who’d hop up onto the ledge in her bare feet and then hop back down. The whole dance of it was making Jones dizzy, and he wished the girl had somewhere to go to keep Colvin’s mind on the matter at hand.

 

Jones took the pipe from the corner of his mouth and knocked the tobacco out with the heel of his boot. “He don’t stand a chance.”

 

“What’s his story?”

 

“Worked as a prosecutor in some small town in Mississippi,” Jones said. “Joined up a couple years ago. Can’t shoot. Can’t track worth a durn.”

 

“Dresses regulation.”

 

“Our days are numbered.”

 

“They still need us.”

 

“If you say,” Jones said.

 

Betty Slick laughed and twirled her dark hair and laughed some more, and brought her show closer to Special Agent in Charge Bruce Colvin. Jones noted she was a pretty girl, with a woman’s figure and pleasant face. She was the kind of girl that still had the dew on her, and Colvin might as well have had a ring in his nose.

 

“I think I’m gettin’ the piles,” Doc said. “Let’s take a walk.”

 

“Where to?”

 

“Out of this mausoleum.”

 

The Urschel place had been cleared of most newspapermen, who had only the day before been working from tents and makeshift offices on the front lawn, on account of not scaring off the kidnappers. They were cleared from the house but not from the story; those bloodsuckers still called every other minute. Four extra phone lines had been added to the house, with agents and police listening to every call, analyzing every telegram, and studying every letter delivered. Simple messages were broken down and straight-ahead words were decoded.

 

“You go to Sheriff Reed’s funeral?”

 

“No, sir,” Jones said. “Couldn’t make it.”

 

“He was an all right fella.”

 

“Reminded me of ole Rome Shields.”

 

“From San Angelo?”

 

“Yep,” Jones said. “Rome Shields taught me everything I know.”

 

“Hell, Buster. Just what do you know?”

 

“The older I get, the more it escapes me.”

 

The trees made a good bit of shade as they walked down Eighteenth along the skinny sidewalk past many smaller homes—bungalows and such—all of them with brand-new cars and children playing on fresh-cut lawns with manicured bushes and trimmed roses. Jones removed his jacket and tucked it in the crook of his arm and over the .45 on his hip. The whole place felt like a hothouse, and he mopped his face a bit. A young agent from the local office slowed his vehicle beside them and asked if they needed a ride somewhere. The older men shook their heads and kept moving.

 

“This country’s going to hell.”

 

“Don’t be gettin’ soft and senile on me,” Jones said. “People have always been evil. Didn’t you read the Bible? There weren’t too many picnics between wars. Or you want to sing me a song about those gay ole days?”

 

“I don’t recall times ever bein’ this bad.”

 

“Don’t take as much to be an outlaw, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

 

“How you figure?”

 

“Remember when we ran the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?”

 

“I remember running that posse on Black Jack.”

 

“Well, when they pulled a job it took some effort,” Jones said. “You had to blast your way out of the bank and hope your horse kept on till the posse gave up. That’s a test of wills and endurance. You planned ahead and saw it through. What you got these days depends on the machine, not the man.”

 

“The best car.”

 

“These hoods are driving vehicles with fourteen and sixteen cylinders. What kind of country sheriff keeps that kind of machine in his garage? They get out of the bank and they’re as good as gone. Who’s gonna catch ’em?”

 

“What would Black Jack have done with a Buick and a Thompson?”

 

“Raise a lot more hell than these folks.”

 

“You know what ole Black Jack said before they hung ’im?”

 

“Tell it again.”

 

“ ‘I’ll be in hell before y’all eat breakfast, boys,’ ” White said, stopping for a moment to light a cigarette. “ ‘Let her rip.’ ”

 

“Took his head clean off, I heard,” Jones said. “Doc, you ever think you’d see a weapon that could fire thirty rounds in the blink of an eye?”

 

“That was made for the military, not for gangsters.”

 

“How you gonna keep it out of their hands?”

 

“Don’t take much skill with a full drum,” White said. “Sure can chew apart the scenery.”

 

“One man becomes an army.”

 

“It’s cowardice,” White said. “Not progress.”

 

When they returned, Kirkpatrick met them on the sunporch and opened the door. Maps and telegrams had been laid on the card table along with books and books of mug shots and prison records.

 

“Anything?” Jones asked.

 

“Cranks,” Kirkpatrick said. “Can you believe that woman had the nerve—”

 

“Yes.”

 

Jones and White removed their hats, laid them crown down, and took a seat at the card table. A negro woman offered some coffee, and they took it, White discussing running back to the hotel for sandwiches to keep the billing easy for expenses. Jones said that sounded fine, and he filled his pipe again and leaned back into the chair. He could hear the birds in the trees and the cicadas buzzing in the heat. The view was obscured and fuzzy on account of the metal screen.

 

“This is the screwiest one,” Kirkpatrick said. “Received it this morning while I was shaving.”

 

He slid the letter across to Jones. Jones glanced down and read it, getting the fire going in the bowl, and looked up at Kirkpatrick.

 

“What?” Kirkpatrick asked. “Surely you don’t think there is anything to something so outrageous?”

 

A letter from Charles F. Urschel to you and the enclosed identification cards will convince you that you are dealing with the Abductors. Immediately upon receipt of this letter you will proceed to obtain the sum of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ($200,000.00) in GENUINE USED FEDERAL RESERVE CURRENCY in the denomination of TWENTY DOLLAR ($20.00) Bills. It will be useless for you to attempt taking notes of SERIAL NUMBERS, MAKING UP DUMMY PACKAGE, OR ANYTHING ELSE IN THE LINE OF ATTEMPTED DOUBLE CROSS. BEAR THIS IN MIND, CHARLES E URSCHEL WILL REMAIN IN OUR CUSTODY UNTIL MONEY HAS BEEN INSPECTED AND EX CHANGED AND FURTHERMORE WILL BE AT THE SCENE OF, CONTACT FOR PAY-OFF AND IF THERE SHOULD BE ANY ATTEMPT AT ANY DOUBLE XX IT WILL BE HE THAT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCE. As soon as you have read and RE-READ this carefully and wish to commence negotiations you will proceed to the DAILY OKLAHOMAN and insert the following BLIND AD under the REAL ESTATE, FARMS FOR SALE, and we will know that you are ready, for BUSINESS, and you will receive further instructions AT THE BOX ASSIGNED TO YOU BY THE NEWSPAPER, AND NO WHERE ELSE. We have neither time or patience to carry on any further lengthy correspondence. RUN THIS AD FOR ONE WEEK IN DAILY OKLAHOMAN. FOR SALE—160 Acres Land, good five room house, deep well. Also Cows, Tools, Tractor, Corn and Hay. $3750.00 for quick sale. TERMS. Box #—hear from us as soon as convenient after insertion of AD.

 

An hour later, the postman delivered a letter with Urschel’s identification and personal signature. From across the table, Doc White asked, “Our boys?”

 

“Yep,” Jones said. “See if Agent Colvin might have the time and inclination to join us. That is, if his dance card ain’t punched.”

 

 

 

 

 

ORA HAD FIXED A BIG SOUTHERN MEAL JUST THE WAY GEORGE liked it, and they all sat together like a proper family at Boss’s place, a mile down the road from where they kept Mr. Urschel. Kathryn let Boss say grace, and George answered it with a big, corny “Amen” and reached for the fried chicken, that long, hairy arm coming clean across the table for a drumstick. Albert Bates complimented her mother on the meal and poured himself a glass of iced tea.

 

“You send over a plate, darlin’?” George asked.

 

“Taters brung it,” Ora said, her voice grating, filled with a lot of North Mississippi; Saltillo to her bones. “Gave him some sliced tomatoes and field peas, too. Reckon he’ll like that?”

 

“Mr. Urschel should be grateful,” Bates said. “A big oilman lives on nothing but sirloin steak and bourbon. Craps out silver dollars like a one-armed bandit.”

 

“He’s due for some slop,” George said.

 

“George,” Ora said.

 

“Oh, no, ma’am, I don’t mean your cookin’ is slop, I’m talking the beans.”

 

“I don’t think he’s cut out for ranch living,” Bates said. “He tried to fight signing that letter, but not real hard. He wants this mess gone.”

 

“And what will you do then, Mr. Bates?” Boss asked. The old man sat at the head of the table in a boiled white shirt buttoned to the throat. He chewed his chicken as he spoke, with a lot of strength in those jaws, looking like a little bulldog gnawing on a bone, thin white hair combed back from his forehead and sticking up like a grizzled rooster’s.

 

“Get back to my sweetie and have some fun,” Bates said. “This is it for me.”

 

“What’s the next step for you, young man?” Boss asked.

 

“If I knew, this wouldn’t be an ounce of fun,” George said with a wink. “You go where you find the action. But I’m figuring they’ll answer that ad and play it smart. We’ll all be out of your hair by Sunday, and me and Kit will be on the road and Albert will be back with his sweetie.”

 

He smiled over at Kathryn, stopping her from laughing about Boss’s hair, and grabbed her knee with his free hand. She looked down at the red-and-white tablecloth and studied the uniform pattern. She hadn’t gotten any food, her stomach twisted up in knots. But George didn’t have a care in the world, reaching back across the table and grabbing a thigh this time and asking her mother for another helping of field peas. Old Ora lit up with smiles like that big mug had hung the goddamn moon.

 

“George, when you finish stuffing your gullet, how ’bout you and me go check out the machine?” Kathryn asked.

 

“Already checked on her,” George said. “Fueled up and ready to go. Got a tin of gas and cans of oil. Don’t you worry about nothin’.”

 

“I’d like to see her anyway,” Kathryn said, moving his hand off her knee, pushing the skirt back down. She reached for the iced tea and poured a glass, wishing these Baptists would wake up to the world and keep some gin in the house.

 

“Sheriff Faith come by today,” Boss said, just as plain as talking about crops and weather.

 

George stopped chewing. He and Albert exchanged glances.

 

“Oh, you boys don’t get nervous,” he said. “I been stashing folks here for years. The sheriff would tell me if the law was onto us.”

 

“May I have some more biscuits?” George asked.

 

“Haven’t you had enough?” Kathryn said.

 

“Why don’t you mind your own business.”

 

Ora hopped up like there was a fire poker in her ass and landed two buttermilk biscuits on his plate. Kathryn just shook her head and walked out the screen door and onto the porch, resting an arm on the column and looking across the pasture at all those goddamn cows mooing at one another, blind and directionless until someone cracked the whip. Suckers.

 

George sure took his time to join her, door clattering shut. He lit a cigarette and patted his stomach, following her down a path and to the garage he’d constructed with Potatoes and Boss that spring. He found the key in his pocket and loosened the lock and chain, opening up the big, wide barn doors to show off that gorgeous midnight blue Cadillac. A full sixteen cylinders, with big, fat pontoon fenders, torpedo headlights, and a slant-back grille topped with that gorgeous silver woman with wings. The places she’d see.

 

Kathryn ran her hand over the paint, which always felt liquid and alive to her, shining wet. She turned and leaned back against the door, crooking her finger at George. He didn’t need to be asked twice, but first shut the garage door and lit up a kerosene lantern.

 

He wrapped his big arms around her and kissed her square on the mouth, not like the men in the movies but like he was kissing somebody to test his brute strength. The way a knucklehead slams his mallet in a carnival game. “Careful,” she said. “Don’t mess up my hair. I just had it done.”

 

“I love you, Kit.”

 

“Don’t I know it.”

 

“That’s a big backseat back there, how ’bout we break her in.”

 

She ran a finger down the loose part of his silk shirt and tipped the brow of his fedora back from those murky green eyes, the color of swamp water. “I thought we’d wait. You know. Just like people do before a wedding.”

 

“Wait till what?”

 

“When you get the money and we’re on the road.”

 

“Come on, Kit. I’m hurtin’ here. And we’re married already, or had you forgot?”

 

“No, I hadn’t forgot.”

 

He wrapped a meaty arm tighter and pulled her in. He reached up under her skirt and was feeling her between the legs and over the panties, and she wasn’t feeling in that kind of mood, but it took her, and she had to tilt her head back to catch her breath. “George?”

 

“You are a peach.”

 

“George.”

 

“I love you, sweet baby.”

 

The garage smelled of polished wood and kerosene and new oil just waiting to get burned up from here to Mexico. “George, I need you to do something.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

He pawed at her dress and pulled down a bra strap, pushing her up on the hood and getting himself good and settled between her legs. With a real gentleness that she could never believe a big man could achieve, he laid her flat on her back and put his mouth to her nipple.

 

“I want you to murder that son of a bitch Ed Weatherford for me,” she said, looking at the tin roof. “He’s onto us, baby.”

 

George stopped and stepped back a few paces, shaking his head. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

 

“George, be a gangster. Really.”

 

He shook his head.

 

Kathryn righted herself up onto her elbows and pushed herself off the Cadillac, fingering up her top and smoothing down the dress over her long legs. She reached into George’s shirt pocket and grabbed some Luckies, lighting the match off the mug’s chin.

 

She blew some smoke and shook her head.

 

His mouth hung open.

 

“You’d rather I do it?”

 

“I didn’t say that,” George said. “But that’s not in the plan.”

 

“Plan’s changed.”

 

“Just ignore him.”

 

“Then he’ll really be gunnin’ for us.”

 

They heard a car’s motor from down the road and then all of Boss’s guineas out there, raising hell and making that high, dumb guinea call. George cracked the barn door and told Kathryn to stay put. He peered out as she smoked and thought about different ways to kill that bastard Weatherford.

 

“Whew,” George said, closing the garage. “Thought it might be the law.”

 

“Who is it?”

 

“Harvey and Verne,” he said. “Ain’t that somethin’? Hope they brought something to drink.”

 

Kathryn shook her head and put out the cigarette with the toe of her high heel made of soft white leather. She made a fist with her right hand and rapped on George’s forehead as if it were a front door to an empty house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

9

 

Harvey Bailey eyed the golf ball, lined up the drive from the hogpen, and aimed for Boss Shannon’s old barn to the north. He still had a bad limp, the bullet out of him and wound stitched up crooked, but they’d lugged the set of clubs all the way from Kansas City and it would’ve been a shame not to play. This being the first time he’d a chance to use them, with all the shooting and bank robbing getting in the way of some solid sport. He took a breath and loosened his shoulders and smacked the ball right in the sweet spot, feeling it down to his toes as the ball went skyward and dropped damn near the mouth of the barn, sending some worried guineas up in a flurry of feathers. “Beat that, chump.”

 

Miller plopped down a ball. He was shirtless, wearing the tailored pants he’d had on for days and the handmade wingtips. His upper body was corded with muscle like a fighter’s, with skin as white as blanched paper, turning pink in the morning sunshine. He took a few practice swings and sent the ball up and away, and it disappeared somewhere over the weathered barn.

 

“I say the barn door is the hole,” Harvey said.

 

“Fine by me.”

 

“You want to get a posthole digger?” he said. “I could get a stick and a rag.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“The Shannons seem a bit jumpy, don’t they?” Harvey said, hoisting the bag up onto his shoulder and limping toward the barn. A bony coonhound loped after them like a spectator to the sport.

 

“Boss especially.”

 

“You think he wants us to leave?”

 

“Could be,” Verne said. “How’s the leg?”

 

“Walking helps,” Harvey said. “Wound’s healing clean, no thanks to that damn butcher who sewed it.”

 

He dropped the bag and chose a number two iron, spying a cat sitting atop a mule plow. The big tom paid the men no mind as it hiked its leg skyward and started to lick its balls.

 

“I knew a man in Lansing who could do that,” Harvey said. “Or claimed he could.”

 

“A man can learn lots of things in prison,” Miller said. “I’d rather hang than go back.”

 

“How’s Vi?”

 

“Scared.”

 

“She want you to come up there?”

 

“Sure,” he said. “Brooklyn isn’t her kind of place.”

 

“You trust those people?”

 

“I did a job for them and, oh, well, they owe me.”

 

“And she understands?”

 

“Vi understands. Always has.”

 

“You love that woman, don’t you?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“You gonna marry her?”

 

“When all this ends,” he said. “Get ahead a little.”

 

“When does this stuff ever end?” Harvey asked. “I got out before this country went in the toilet. That’s what happens. You try and go legit, get into some corny business like filling stations, and then the world shits on you. Take what you can get when you can get it.”

 

“One more score,” Verne said. “Something big for us both.”

 

“Verne?” Harvey said, setting the ball right for the big tom. “I don’t know how many different ways to say it. Next time I walk into a bank, it’ll be with a checkbook, not a gun.”

 

Verne met his gaze with those cold blue eyes and smiled.

 

Harvey tapped the ball with a flick and it sailed within a hair of the big cat, the animal toppling over on his back and scampering away.

 

“Don’t look back,” Harvey said. “Don’t get greedy. Know your price. When it’s met, walk away.”

 

Verne walked around the back of the barn, searching for his ball in some high grass and swatting away some goats set loose to clear it. He switched at the grass with his iron and looked for a good ten minutes before Harvey called time on the hunt.

 

Behind him, maybe a half mile away, Harvey’s eye caught old man Shannon’s Model T kicking up dust, heading out to the house where his boy lived. This was the fourth trip he’d made that morning. Twice with George and now twice alone.

 

“What’s going on at Armon’s place?”

 

“That kid needs a swift kick in the ass,” Miller said. “Son of a bitch. You saw that ball land here, didn’t you?”

 

“Did you see George’s face when we asked if he’d like to take on some work last week?”

 

“What of it?”

 

“When’s the last time ole George Kelly didn’t want to pick up some bucks behind the wheel? He wet himself coming around the Green Lantern, wanting to work a job, and far as I could tell he and Kit aren’t rolling in it. You think he got something else going?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“With who?”

 

“Kit’s got into something.”

 

“You trust that rancid bitch?”

 

Miller glanced at him and smiled. He stared out at the farm road and the Model T, growing close and then passing the men in a big old cloud of dust. He reached down and found the ball, tossing it out on some clear land, just a stroke away from a pile of goat shit.

 

“How ’bout we play up the road a bit?” Miller said. “Might find something that interests us.”

 

 

 

 

 

ALL THAT MONEY MADE THE BANKER NERVOUS, BUT MRS. Urschel had signed the forms, and there was nothing that the little bald fella could do about it. He watched at the far end of the Slick Company board-room, leaning into the desk with white knuckles that made Gus Jones smile, while his comptroller and staff worked overtime to log every serial number onto individual pieces of paper. The money was circulated—as requested in the letter that came to box number 807 that morning—all from the Federal Reserve in Kansas City. If Mr. Urschel came back safe, they’d pass these numbers to every lawman, post office, and bank in the country. The gang left little to chance with a letter that spelled out every dance step.

 

In view of the fact that you have the Ad inserted as per our instructions, we gather that you are prepared to meet our ultimatum.

 

You will pack TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS (($200,000) in USED GENUINE FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES OF TWENTY DOLLAR DENOMINATION in a suitable LIGHT COLORED LEATHER BAG and have someone purchase transportation for you, including berth, aboard train #28 (The Sooner) which departs at 10:10 p.m. via the M.K.&T Lines for Kansas City, Mo.

 

You will ride on the OBSERVATION PLATFORM where you may be observed by someone at some Station along the Line between Okla. City and K.C., Mo. If indications are alright, somewhere along the Right-of-Way you will observe a Fire on the Right Side of Track (Facing direction train is bound). That fi rst Fire will be your Cue to be prepared to throw BAG to Track immediately after passing SECOND FIRE.

 

Mr. Urschel will, upon instructions, attend to the fi res and secure the bag when you throw it off, he will open it and transfer the contents to a sack that he will be provided with, so, if you comply with our demand and do not attempt any subterfuge, as according to the News reports you have pledged, Mr. Urschel should be home in a very short while.

 

REMEMBER THIS—IF ANY TRICKERY IS ATTEMPTED YOU WILL FIND THE REMAINS OF URSCHEL AND INSTEAD OF JOY THERE WILL BE DOUBLE GRIEF—FOR SOME-ONE VERY NEAR AND DEAR TO THE URSCHEL FAMILY IS UNDER CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE AND WILL LIKE-WISE SUFFER FOR YOUR ERROR.

 

If there is the slightest HITCH in these PLANS for any reason what-so-ever, not your fault, you will proceed on into Kansas City, Mo. And register at the Muehlebach Hotel under the name of E. E. Kincaid of Little Rock, Arkansas, and await further instructions there, however, there should not be, IF YOU COMPLY WITH THESE SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS.