THE MAIN THING IS DO NOT DIVULGE THE CONTENTS OF THIS LETTER TO ANY LAW AUTHORITIES FOR WE HAVE NO INTENTION OF FUTHER COMMUNICATION.

 

YOU ARE TO MAKE THIS TRIP SATURDAY, JULY 29th 1933. BE SURE YOU RIDE THE PLATFORM OF THE REAR CAR AND HAVE THE BAG WITH MONEY IN IT FROM THE TIME YOU LEAVE OKLAHOMA CITY.

 

Jones watched as bundles of counted money were loaded in a light-colored Gladstone bag. The kidnappers being so goddamn specific about the type, everyone worried that the slightest error might lead poor old Charlie into the grave.

 

“Little dramatic,” Doc White said, reading over Jones’s shoulder. “All that talk about ‘double grief.’ ”

 

“Well, it ain’t a love letter.”

 

“You think Kirkpatrick is up to it?”

 

“I think he’s not only up to it,” Jones said, finding the gold watch at his vest. “He’s damn well excited about it.”

 

“Give him a gun?”

 

“You think that’s a good idea? I’ll be on that train, too.”

 

“But the letter said—”

 

“Nuts to those bandits,” Jones said. “They don’t know me. I’ll carry the ransom, and Kirkpatrick a dummy bag, in case there’s trouble . . .”

 

“That banker sure is sweating.”

 

“You keep an eye on Mrs. Urschel and the family,” Jones said. “I’ll call when we reach Kansas City.”

 

“Union Station.”

 

“That’s where the tracks lead.”

 

“Why don’t you let me take the lead, Buster?” White asked. “Wait it out here. We can’t do a thing till Urschel comes back.”

 

“Since when did you become my wife?”

 

“Since when did you become a touchy old bastard?”

 

“Hell with you.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Watch the family.”

 

“Watch your ass, Buster,” White said. “That station ain’t held the best luck. And I ain’t calling on Mary Ann for you stepping in a shit pile twice.”

 

 

 

 

 

“THEY DON’T MEAN NOTHIN’ BY IT, KIT,” ALBERT BATES SAID. “They’re just catching up on old times. George likes to reminisce.”

 

“Well, I hate it.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I was so damn glad when he got out from under those mugs and we got the hell out of Saint Paul,” Kathryn said. “I didn’t see the sun for four months up there. The ground was nothing but black slush and not a spot of green. All they did was sit around the Green Lantern and drink themselves stupid. George would lie around in pajamas, listening to Buck Rogers, for months, and then he’d be wheel on a job and come back with a cheap handout. Harv and Verne throwing him the dog scraps, and George never asking for anything better.”

 

“But you liked Tacoma?”

 

“I liked George in Tacoma,” she said. “He doesn’t act like this in front of you or Eddie. He acted normal. He’s always putting on for Verne and that bastard Harvey Bailey. I can’t stand that big-nosed son of a bitch. Everyone says he’s such a gentleman, the ‘Gentleman Bandit,’ the class yeggman, but he’s nothing but a two-bit Mis-sou-ra hick in a hundred-dollar suit with whitewall hair.”

 

“Slow down, Kit,” Bates said. “They can hear you.”

 

“Do I look like I care?”

 

She turned back to the farmhouse window and saw the men inside, the kitchen all bright with a yellow glow, the dumb yeggs laughing and knee-slapping around the makeshift table and plunking down cards, cigars screwed down in their teeth. Old Boss Shannon took up the fourth seat like he was just one of the boys and not some old farmer who ran a rooming house for criminals. Boss had been taking their dirty money since he and Ora met, yeggs from all over the damn country coming to Paradise. All shot up and bloody, suitcases full of cash and with itchy fingers, and offering a teenage girl a few bits for a quick throw, saying it might be their last . . .

 

“It’s okay,” Albert Bates said, his hawk-nosed profile crossed in the kerosene light. He fumbled for a fresh cigarette and smiled over at her. “George won’t mention it.”

 

“He better not,” she said. “He lets these boys in on Urschel and I’ll cut his nuts off.”

 

“They’re not wise to us,” Bates said, cupping a hand and flicking the lighter’s flint. “We’ll all be gone tomorrow. Your stepdaddy will watch Urschel till we come back and turn him loose.”

 

“That’s another screw I worry about.”

 

“Mr. Urschel?”

 

“Boss.”

 

“He’s gettin’ a cut,” Bates said. “No one wants to whittle this thing down any more.”

 

“You really gonna quit?”

 

“You bet,” he said. “A fella can get set up with this kind of dough.”

 

“Denver, huh?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Albert?”

 

He turned to her, burning down the cigarette and fishing for a new one in his pocket. She pulled a cigarette from her purse, lit it, and passed it on to him. She found a place on the edge of the farmhouse porch to let her legs hang off free and loose, and Bates joined her after a while. The laughter and loud talk had become too much.

 

“How will I know if there’s trouble?” she asked.

 

“You studied the picture of Kirkpatrick?”

 

She nodded.

 

“You see anyone with him, anyone too friendly, you step off the train at any station and call us,” he said. “He’s supposed to come alone, and that’s the only way we’ll go ahead with the drop. You unnerstand?”

 

“You just look out for George.”

 

“Your man will come back in one piece,” Bates said, cigarette hanging loose. “I promise.”

 

“It’s not him I’m worried about.”

 

“You sure are hard-boiled sometimes, Kit,” Bates said. “We’re on Easy Street now.”

 

“That’s the kind of talk that will get us all killed. Or worse.”

 

“You love him, though?”

 

“Who?”

 

“George.”

 

“I married the dumb bastard, didn’t I?”

 

“But do you love him?” Bates asked. “When I think about seeing my sweetie, it makes me feel all funny in the gut.”

 

“Yep,” she said. “George makes me feel all funny.”

 

Bates laughed and smoked some more, watching the same herd of cows, following down a line of crooked posts connected with miles of barbed wire.

 

“The funny thing about you and George is that sometimes he’s talking but I hear you coming out of his mouth.”

 

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

 

“I don’t mean nothing by it,” Bates said. “Just something I’ve noticed for some time. I’ve known George Barnes since he was running moonshine out of Memphis. And now I see this fella who folks ’round here call ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly, with his slick hair and two-tone shoes. But I’m not really sure if that’s you or George . . . It’s all screwy.”

 

“You’re the screwy one, Albert,” she said. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek in a sisterly way. “You look out for both of you. And don’t worry, I’m pretty good at spotting a cop.”

 

“I know, sister.”

 

“No more hard times.”

 

“Welcome to Easy Street.”

 

“Keep the light on . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

 

10

 

 

Saturday, July 29, 1933

 

The men gathered in the shadow of the Urschel house with pistols and sawed-off shotguns and waited for the bank president to arrive with the cash. An Oldsmobile rolled into the drive and flashed its lights twice. Berenice Urschel answered back from the second floor with a flickering flashlight, and they were moving. Jones followed Kirkpatrick, and Kirkpatrick took the grip and got into the car with Jones driving. They headed to the train station, both men holding grips now—Kirkpatrick holding a leather bag filled with old newspapers and magazines and Jones carrying a lighter-colored bag filled with twenty pounds’ worth of ransom money. If they were jumped at the station or on the train, Kirk would give up his bag.

 

They proceeded up into the observation car as instructed, and the strain of it reflected on Kirkpatrick, who let out a long breath, his face covered in sweat, hand reaching into his suit pocket for a silver flask. He took a healthy drink and nodded to Jones, who sat opposite him on a long communal bench and shook his head. So far, the men were alone. Just a negro porter, who asked them for their tickets and if they’d care for anything at all, and Jones had simply asked if they were running on schedule.

 

Jones checked his timepiece. He lit his pipe.

 

A half hour left till they were on their way.

 

The platform filled with dozens of men in straw hats and ladies in summer dresses. Little kids toting little bags and porters carrying steamer trunks on the strength of their backs. Jones looked to the rear of the train, where the glass formed a wide-sweeping window, and saw another Pullman heading toward them, pushed along slow and easy, until it joined to the observation car with a click. The coupling jarred the men, and then there was another hard click, and the porter noted the men’s confusion.

 

“Got to add two more,” he said. “Taking on extra passengers in Kansas City to go to the World’s Fair.”

 

Kirkpatrick was on his feet, telling the man they had to change cars, they must change cars, this was not acceptable at all. They had been promised an observation view, had paid for the view, and he damn well wanted a view.

 

They got seats on the last Pullman, Jones and Kirkpatrick taking a seat on two old camp stools pulled out into the vestibule. The air was hot, and it wasn’t until the train got going that a good crossbreeze collected over the railing and pushed across their faces, Jones and Kirkpatrick sitting in that last car, watching the brick warehouses and ramshackle houses fading from view until there were only wide rolling fields of dry grass and dead cornstalks.

 

“Right side,” Jones said. “I’ll watch the left just to make sure.”

 

They made it all the way to Tyson when the car door slid open and an attractive woman dressed in black with dark lipstick asked if she could join them.

 

Jones stood and said: “Please.”

 

She smelled just like the flowers Mary Ann cut fresh and kept in the house till they dried and turned. The turning seemed to make ’em even more sweet.

 

 

 

 

 

HARVEY AND VERNE WATCHED GEORGE, KATHRYN, AND ALBERT Bates pile into that big blue Cadillac and disappear down the country road. George said they were going to visit some old speaks, Kathryn wanted to see Gold Diggers of 1933, and Albert Bates said in a mutter he had some business needed tending. And Harvey didn’t ask any questions, just wished them well as they took off into the night, and he settled onto the porch with Verne and old Boss Shannon, who’d been plied with enough corn liquor to kill a goat. Old Boss talking about how two hundred thousand people had crammed into downtown Saint Louis to march on behalf of the NRA and celebrate all that Blue Eagle nonsense, and he recommended that they all get a solid gun and a piece of land because this country was about to become one filthy fascist nation with Roosevelt no better than Adolf Hitler himself. “You know Hitler treats his own people like animals. If he got one that don’t suit ’im, they’ll sterilize ’im. God’s own truth, I read it in the paper. I wonder what they’d do with an old man like me?”

 

“How’s the farm, Boss?”

 

“Fair to middlin’,” he said. “Don’t have enough water. Got me a hog that’s turned on me. He’s supposed to be ruttin’ but the other day damn near tried to kill me. I can’t figure it out.”

 

Miller looked to Harvey. Harvey flicked the long ash from his cigar and shrugged.

 

“Can we go take a look at that hog?” Miller asked.

 

“Sure thing, boys,” Boss Shannon said. “Let me get a lantern.”

 

“Say, Boss,” Harvey said, “where’s ole Potatoes these days?”

 

“You know he got that girl from down the road with child? Well, he married her, and now she’s knocked up again. I ’spec you could say he’s taken on responsibility. He don’t like it when I call him Potatoes no more. But I can’t seem to wrap my mind ’round it. That kid will always be Potatoes to me. Hold on there, fellas.”

 

Harvey worked on the cigar. The late-night light, not dark but almost purple, still burning deep to the west, almost making him feel like he could see clear over to California and the Pacific Ocean, all wide and endless like a filthy dream.

 

“Why don’t you just ask him, Verne?”

 

“Where’s the fun?” Miller said. “Besides, you think he would talk that easily?”

 

“He’s going to scream.”

 

“Let him scream.”

 

“What if he gets killed?”

 

“He won’t get killed,” Miller said. “Whoever heard of a hog killing a man?”

 

“I have,” Harvey said. “You know, I grew up on a farm.”

 

“You don’t say.”

 

“I still have a farm,” Harvey said. “Just what do you know about me, Verne?”

 

“I know enough.”

 

Boss Shannon was wearing his finest pair of Union overalls with high-laced boots and an almost clean undershirt. He’d taken a plug of tobacco from a tin in the kitchen and was sucking and spitting as they followed a hog path down along the barbed-wire fence. Pigs wallowed and grunted in a mud enclosure, and nearby the men found a rambling cage of wire and barn wood where a huge hog looked into the lantern light with tiny red eyes.

 

“What do you call him?”

 

“Hoover,” Boss Shannon said, spitting. “Armon named him. Ain’t that a hoot? Hoover. Don’t he look just like him?”

 

“You called him Armon there.”

 

“See?” Boss said. “I’m trying.”

 

“I wish he’d come down and see us,” Miller said. “We could have a drink. He might like some whiskey we brought from Kansas City. He could play organ for us. I wonder if he knows ‘We’re In the Money’ ?”

 

“I’ll tell him, but he can’t leave the house much on account of his wife’s condition. ’Sides, he only plays church music.”

 

“They have some company?”

 

“No, sir,” Boss said. “Alone, besides that ole hound. Yep, just Armon and his bride. And like I said, that dog.”

 

Miller drew a .45 automatic from his belt and said, “Take your clothes off, Boss.”

 

“You boys always joking,” the old man said with a smile.

 

“He ain’t joking,” Harvey said.

 

“Come on, now. Y’all lost your senses. I don’t have no money.”

 

“We don’t want money,” Miller said.

 

“What do you want?”

 

“For you to drop your drawers and crawl in the slop with ole Hoover there,” Miller said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

 

“You boys lost your mind. I just finished telling you that hog has something wrong with its faculties. He could right kill me.”

 

Miller squeezed off a round at Boss’s feet, and the man jumped like an impromptu reel had started up. Harvey laughed and turned his head so Boss couldn’t see the smile and think they didn’t mean serious business.

 

“Socks and underwear, too.”

 

“I ain’t goin’ in the cage with a hungry hog with my pecker freed.”

 

Miller fired off another round. And Boss danced a jig till he wore nothing but his T-shirt, like it was a long flour-sack dress. Harvey slid back the lock on the cage and waved his hand, a doorman at the finest speak in the city. “Your party awaits.”

 

“You two crooked sonsabitches. Want to see me cornholed by a filthy swine. That’s a sickness. The plagues will come on you tenfold. You know it.”

 

Harvey slid back the bolt. He got the cigar going again to a glowing red tip. He checked the time.

 

“How long?” Miller asked.

 

“I’ll say ten minutes.”

 

“I’ll say five or less.”

 

“How much?”

 

“Hundred dollars.”

 

“This some kind of sport!” Boss said. “Goddamn you both to hell in your underbritches.”

 

There was a guttural snort, red eyes in the passing beam of the kerosene lantern. Light scattered from Boss Shannon’s hand down into the mud and muck and pig shit before a high squeal sounded that the men took for the animal but would later figure out was only Boss.

 

Miller only had to ask once, “Just what have George and Kit gotten themselves into, and how can we get a slice?”

 

 

 

 

 

KATHRYN BOARDED THE TRAIN IN MUSKOGEE AFTER TAKING another line from Denison, Texas, and waiting it out for the Sooner Limited. The observation car had filled with a half dozen drunk businessmen with loose neckties and five o’clock shadows and two sour-faced old women who shook their heads at each other as the men told one another off-color jokes and freely exchanged bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. “This fella has a trained dog he gives twenty cents that will go to the corner for a newspaper and a bucket of beer. Well, one day he doesn’t have change and sends the dog away with five whole dollars. Some time passes, and the dog doesn’t come back, so he goes lookin’. He finds the rascal in a back alley really sticking his business to a mongrel bitch. ‘I’m surprised at you,’ the man says. ‘You’ve never acted like this before.’ And the dog says, ‘I never had the money before.’ ” She stayed there through two stops, not spotting Kirkpatrick and thinking maybe he’d begged off on the plan, but then she decided to walk through the passenger cars trailing behind them, crowded with church and civic groups from Houston, Waco, and Dallas, headed to the big city of Chicago and the big Fair. One group had a little ragtag band with them, and for some reason they launched into “You’ve Got to Be a Football Hero,” and they thought their antics hilarious as a few of the boys tossed a ball in the center aisle, nearly sending Kathryn off her feet. But she recovered and scowled, readjusting her little black hat and veil, and finding the final vestibule where, through the glass, she could make out two figures sitting on stools and watching the night pass.

 

She opened the sliding door, and the older of the men stood, offering her a seat.

 

She said thank you, but she wanted to stretch her legs.

 

Kathryn reached into her purse, grabbed her little cigarette case and lighter, and had a bit of difficulty in the wind. The men didn’t talk, just watched the snaking tracks, wheels groaning and scraping under them until the path righted again and they headed due north, the hard earth and parched farms flickering past. The night was as clear as could be, and the stars looked like a million winking diamonds.

 

“Where you men headed?” she asked.

 

“Kansas City,” said the younger man, who hadn’t offered his seat.

 

The older man wore a cowboy hat and smoked a pipe. He got off his seat again and removed his hat. “Chicago,” he said.

 

“Not traveling together?”

 

“No, ma’am,” he said. “Just passing the time with a friendly drink.”

 

“Would you like some?” asked the other man, and he got to his feet, using the rail for support. He seemed a bit nervous and a little drunk. But she as hell recognized him as Mr. E. E. Kirkpatrick of Tom Slick Enterprises. Two Gladstone bags lay side by side.

 

She turned her head and said no thank you, stepping back from the platform into shadow. The sound and vibration of the train coming up into her feet made her knees a bit weak. There was something about the old man that she didn’t trust or like, and, when the train stopped in Arcadia, he got up to stretch, looking across to Kirkpatrick, who shook his head. The old man wore wire-framed cheaters and a gun on his hip. He was old but had the look of the law written across his wide face.

 

She told the men good night and crawled off onto the platform, looking for the number George had scrawled on a matchbook from the Blackstone Hotel . . . If there was any cause, any cause at all, call them at this telephone number . She checked her watch and prayed there was time for a meet in Tulsa.

 

 

 

 

 

“THIS IS WHERE MR. SLICK DRILLED HIS FIRST WELL,” E. E. Kirkpatrick said as the Sooner pulled into the town of Tryon The big locomotive hissed and shuttered in rest while folks got on and off in the early morning. The porter brought Jones a cup of coffee as Kirkpatrick drained the rest of the little flask and then reached into his hip pocket for a spare. “Yes, sir. That was back in ’05.”

 

“You don’t say.”

 

“I wasn’t with him then,” Kirkpatrick said, taking a sizable swallow, still trying to calm his nerves. “But I know Mr. Slick had some trouble getting leases. Bought space up in the local paper and even joined the Masonic lodge. But he said Tryon people were the most stubborn folks he’d ever met, and he’d had to pull up stakes before they knew he meant business.”

 

“You might want to slow down with the liquor, partner,” Jones said.

 

“My hand is steady,” Kirkpatrick said. “My reflexes agile. The drink just keeps the perception a bit more keen.”

 

Jones nodded and drank some coffee. The dawn focused to the east in a dull, gray light, and the old man stretched his legs and studied the porters hauling suitcases and trunks into the baggage car. The car door rolled to a heavy slam, and the steam engine started up again with the conductor’s whistle.

 

“Mr. Slick always got what he wanted,” Kirkpatrick said. “He did. Yes, sir. He said he wanted to be a millionaire and didn’t rest till he was the King.”

 

“And so Tryon made him a millionaire?” Jones said.

 

“They blasted every hole with nitroglycerin to shake her loose but ended up with nothing but dusters.”

 

Kirkpatrick grinned a bit to himself and chuckled and took another nip of whiskey, staring straight down the line of tracks from where they’d come, his mind settling on a place that was solid and familiar. He patted the Gladstone bag as he stood. But when he reached for the flask again, Jones pulled it from his hand and tucked it into his coat pocket.

 

“After the deal, Kirk,” Jones said. “C’mon, let’s get you some coffee.” The black locomotive steamed and chugged on through Tulsa and over the Cimarron River, taking a hard, clanging turn north. Tulsa’s factories bellowing with smoke and the refineries spewing fire soon faded into the lonely glow of old farmhouses and quiet little towns—Bartlesville, Dewey, Coffeyville, and Parsons. Storefronts all shut up with planks over windows and doors. FOR SALE signs across vacant lots and farms. But nothing of the signal. Not even the smell of a fire on the horizon. The old negro porter found the men drinking coffee and smoking in silence as the train jarred to its final stop—the fifty-first from Oklahoma City—and he stood next to them nodding as the Katy’s tracks converged with dozens in a wide, sprawling maze of steel and crushed granite. When Jones peered around toward the engine, he could just make out the big cathedral shape of Union Station coming into view.

 

“They said for me to come alone,” Kirkpatrick said.

 

“And we’ll comply.”

 

“I can handle this.”

 

“Don’t feel like taking chances on a Sunday.”

 

“You didn’t have to take away my liquor,” Kirkpatrick said. “Got cold back here.”

 

“Least eighty degrees.”

 

“Perhaps we should take two cabs to the Muehlebach?”

 

“I’ll stay close,” Jones said, holding on to the rail and looking east to a bright sunrise. “These folks are having some fun making us jump through hoops.”

 

Jones followed Kirkpatrick through the long beams of lights across the marble floors, train schedules being read over the public address, and right through the front doors he’d taken with Joe Lackey what seemed like years ago. In his mind, he still kept the picture of old Sheriff Reed and that young agent chewed up and bleeding to death on the street.

 

He arrived at the Muehlebach Hotel minutes later and found the house phone so he could be connected to “Mr. Kincaid.” There were potted palms and brass spittoons, sofas as large as beds. Gentlemen and ladies all spoke to one another like they were in a library, and near the registration desk a fella with greased hair played a grand piano. Kirkpatrick finally answered and gave Jones his room number. “Make sure no one sees you.”

 

“I didn’t figure on being announced.”

 

Two hours later, the men got a knock on the door. A postal telegram read UNAVOIDABLE INCIDENT KEPT ME FROM SEEING YOU LAST NIGHT. WILL COMMUNICATE ABOUT 6 O’CLOCK.—E. E. MOORE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

11

 

A hand shook Charlie Urschel awake sometime in the middle of the night, him knowing it was night because he’d heard the second plane pass overhead and on account of asking the boy the time every time he’d heard it. He couldn’t see or feel his arm but heard the distinctive click of the chains and felt his dead arm coming to rest in his lap. Then there were hands upon him, rubbing him, giving him the Mr. Urschel, Mr. Urschel, wake up, and it was all so rushed and furious that he was pretty well convinced this was it, they’d messed up the deal and now were going to finish him off. But Charles F. Urschel would not give the bastards the pleasure of seeing one jigger of emotion, and he struggled to find his feet using only the good arm. He felt the rip of tape from his eyes, and the whole damn blackness was filled with a harsh morning light coming from the east windows. Mr. Urschel, here’s ten dollars. It’s all we got, now run. Jes’ remember me in your kindness and prayers ’cause these bastards don’t trifle none. Charlie knew the words were coming from the old man but still couldn’t see him, being as blind as a man in a snow-storm, as he allowed himself to be led out into the morning heat and told to Jes’ keep goin’, don’t look back, don’t look back for nothin’, till he hit the main highway. And Charlie didn’t ask questions but loped forward, sightless and fumbling and holding on to his left arm, massaging it with his fingers because it was about the only thing that kept him vigilant and sharp and knowing he was alive. Soon he was able to feel the rocks and stones on his bare feet, the hot wind blowing his pajamas like a loose tent.

 

He rubbed his raw eyes with his fists until he saw spots, and he tried to move forward, the sun being the first thing that actually had a shape to it, white-hot and burning. He looked down to the ground, the flatness of the hard earth, the thorny weeds and scrub brush cutting and ripping, and Urschel lost his shirt and tore at the cloth, binding the strips to cover his feet. And the shapes were hollow and glowing, and he didn’t know if he was headed toward the road the old man spoke of or was wandering aimlessly in whatever godforsaken land they’d taken him to. He was sweating now, and he figured the morning had crept on, maybe two hours since he’d been cut loose. On the horizon, all he saw were gassy mirages and more flat land, in some kind of dusty limbo where he’d walk and lope, growing so thirsty that he didn’t know a mirage from a water hole but kept moving ahead until he finally became entangled in a row of barbed wire. Hung in his own personal Calvary.

 

He took a breath, his legs quivering with the exertion. He unpricked the line from his skin and then touched the wire with his fingertips. The strips of it pierced his hands, but, goddamn, he knew this was a road, and if he could just keep moving ahead it would lead somewhere. The sun was high, and he could see almost regular now, watching a big-eared jackrabbit loping across the dusty plain.

 

The goddamn jackrabbit didn’t need water.

 

He could go on forever in the morning dew.

 

The cloth strips had fallen away from his feet, the earth so hot he couldn’t sense the gravity anymore. The fence line led to an empty pool of water and then another pool of nothing, and if he could just keeping going there was a road leading back to Oklahoma City and pitchers of iced tea with bridge games and light, leisurely walks for gentlemen after their evening meal, where they patted their stomachs and cleaned their teeth with pocketknives.

 

He smiled at the thought, bringing his shoulders back, shoeless and wearing only the pajama bottoms, trying to walk like Charles Urschel would. He walked as if people could see him and would know him and could recognize he was a man of great importance in the community.

 

He figured it to be early afternoon when he about gave up.

 

But there was a figure in the distance. And he called to it.

 

The figure called back and waved his hat.

 

It was Tom Slick himself, covered in top-grade oil up to his knees and elbows, with that rascal grin on his lips.

 

Charlie, you look like shit warmed over.

 

“Well, hello, Tom. I sure am in a pickle.”

 

 

 

 

 

A FEW HOURS FROM THE DROP AND KATHRYN DECIDED THE GANG should take in a movie. Not just any movie but Gold Diggers of 1933, with Joan Blondell, a picture that Photoplay and Shadoplay had called a hot-shit masterpiece. There was even a full-page advertisement in the Kansas City Star she’d bought at the Tulsa station for a special showing at the Newman Theater that promised some cool, refrigerated air. She wasn’t sure if she was more excited about seeing Blondell’s gowns or getting out of the damn heat. But after some nonsense from Popeye and Mickey Mouse—George laughing so hard he snorted—the movie finally started up, and there she was with a big mug on either side of her, George dozing off not even five minutes after the lights dimmed, and Albert, who’d kicked his two-tone lace-ups up on the empty seats in front of him, munching a bag of popcorn.

 

Kathryn couldn’t contain it. She saw the whole dream of her life coming together as those chippies danced and twirled onscreen with big silver dollars on their hands and stuck between their legs over their snatches. Hands waving. Feet skipping. Twirling, dancing, and jumping. We’re in the money, the skies are sunny . . . She wanted to jump up into the screen and join right in.

 

Here she was. Cleo Brooks. Born in Saltillo, Mississippi. Born on nothing. Born to nothing. She’d been stupid, getting knocked up at fifteen because some boy told her he just wanted to feel it for a second, and then getting involved with that moody bastard Charlie Thorne, who said he’d die for her—and did—and then Little Steve Anderson, who damn near killed her. She remembered being black-and-blue, mouth cut and bloody, his slim, bony hands knocking the stuffing from her every night he got loaded on bathtub gin, and then nearly being sent to prison for pinching a bottle of perfume and a velvet beret. It was George who bailed her out of the can, him being nothing more than a childish scrawl on a cocktail napkin, and the one who told Anderson—that big-dick bootlegger in Fort Worth—that if he so much as looked at her again, he’d rip his goddamn head off and shit down his neck. But somehow every step—from Mississippi to Tulsa and to Fort Worth—had brought her here to Kansas City, where she was finally going to be the woman that she’d imagined. All they needed was that fat Gladstone grip.

 

We’re in the money, we’re in the money.

 

She wanted to dance on the seat but instead squeezed Albert Bates’s meaty arm. He ate some more popcorn and gave her a solid ole wink like only a good mug could handle.

 

George started to snore, fedora over his eyes, and Kathryn glanced behind her in the big space of the movie theater, finding that there were only six people at the matinee. She moved her shoulder, and his head lolled to the side, splurting awake, then finding her shoulder and snoring again.

 

Albert finished the popcorn and wadded up the bag.

 

He checked his watch.

 

It had been a long night, and during a sappy love scene she found herself in the bathroom and washed her face and hands, reapplied her makeup and ran a comb through her black hair and used some dark wine tint on her lips.

 

She’d been on a train and in a car so long that her ass hurt. And she hung back from the boys for a bit, leaning into the wall of the darkened theater. She pulled some loose hair from her face and tucked a knuckle under her chin. She’d always felt rich in a movie house. She liked the way this place had long red drapes sashed open, red lamps, glowing like a Chinaman’s tearoom, running down the aisles. Lots of brass railings and comfortable velvet seats. You could be anyone in a movie house and dream as big as you wanted without feeling like a sap. She’d worn her best gown and some comfortable T-strap slippers. They’d go out tonight. They had to go out. She didn’t care a bit about George wanting them to lay low. What’s the use of being rich if no one saw you flaunt it?

 

She checked her watch. This drop was as slow as Christmas.

 

Blondell was on the street now in a fine French number, scarf knitted gaily at her throat, watching some poor bastard stoop to his knees to pick up a discarded cigarette. She grabbed the man’s shoulder as if in some ballet and lit her own fresh cigarette with his and gave the poor bastard the new one. I don’t know if he deserves a bit of sympathy, / Forget your sympathy. Now, that was class. That’s the kind of rich gal that Kathryn Kelly would be. She’d never forget hard times. Remember my forgotten man, she sang. You had him cultivate the land; / He walked behind a plow, / The sweat fell from his brow, / But look at him right now! . . . Blondell caressed the lamppost, holding on like the earth was unstable, and moved through the whole moody dream, thinking about those forgotten men, bastards who’d fought and bled in the war and now marched through soup kitchens and breadlines, as she let go of the post. She placed both hands on her left hip, that slight cock of the hip getting Kathryn thinking. She could do that, she could hold that power without the post. And once, he used to love me, / I was happy then; / He used to take care of me, / Won’t you bring him back again? / ’Cause ever since the world began, / A woman’s got to have a man; / Forgetting him, you see, / Means you’re forgetting me . . .

 

Nuts to that.

 

She checked her watch.

 

It was time.

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG AT A QUARTER TILL SIX, GUS JONES picked up the receiver while Kirkpatrick paced the hotel room.

 

“Who’s talking?” asked a man with a raspy voice.

 

“Kincaid,” Jones said.

 

“This is Moore,” the man said. “You get my wire?”

 

“I did.”

 

“Well,” the man said, pausing, “are you ready to close the deal?”

 

“Should be, if I knew that I were dealin’ with the right parties.”

 

“You ought to know by now,” the man said. “Listen now and follow these instructions. Take a Yellow Cab, drive to the Hotel La Salle, get out, take the suitcase in your right hand, and start walking west.”

 

“I figured on taking the suitcase.”

 

“Who is this?”

 

“I’ll be there at six-twenty,” Jones said. “I have a friend who came up here with me—I figured on bringing him along.”

 

“Hell, no,” the man said. “We know all about your friend, we saw that fat old man on the train last night. You come alone and unarmed. You got me? We get wind otherwise and Urschel’s dead.”

 

The phone rang off and the operator came on the line. Jones hung up.

 

“What did they say?” Kirkpatrick asked.

 

“They spotted me on the train.”

 

“Hot coffee,” Kirkpatrick said. “I knew it. I just knew it.”

 

“Cool your britches,” Jones said, reaching for his suit jacket and slipping into it. He placed some .45 bullets in his pants pocket and checked the load in the cylinder. “I’ll be right behind you. Grab the bag and take a Yellow Cab to the Hotel La Salle. That’s south from here. Once you get there, start walking west.”

 

“Which way is west?”

 

“Ask the doorman.”

 

Kirkpatrick nodded and felt for the .38 he’d tucked into his trousers. Jones looked at him and reached out for the gun with his right hand. Kirkpatrick took a breath and then passed it over.

 

“Just walk,” Jones said. “And don’t look back. Just keep walking till they make contact. I’ll be behind you. Give ’em what they want. Don’t negotiate and don’t try to be a hero. Just hand over the money.”

 

“And then what?”

 

“We pray these moneygrubbing bastards are honest men.”

 

 

 

YOU COULDN’T MISS THE SON OF A BITCH. IT WAS THE SAME AS watching a drunk man trying to walk straight; they do everything cockamamy. And here was Mr. E. E. Kirkpatrick, executive of Tom Slick Enterprises, trying to act normal. He strolled along the boulevard on a hot Sunday evening with that goddamn beautiful Gladstone grip. Kathryn even loved the color, a light butternut brown. She thought she could even smell the leather from the open window in the big Cadillac, scrunched down in the backseat that would fit four fat men, the Thompson she hocked her life to buy clutched in her arms in case there was trouble. Across the street, in a stolen Chevrolet, Albert Bates had a rifle poked out a side window. And George was in an alley, waiting for Albert to bump the lights, and then he’d move down Linwood Street, down that tony row of dress designers and shoe shops and hatmakers and a dozen places Kathryn wanted to visit, to make contact with the sucker.

 

She knew this would work out from the first time she’d read the Urschels’ wedding announcement. They went to Saint Louis or somewhere for their honeymoon and they both shared some children and all that tra-la-la. But what she read was “Come and get me.” Kirkpatrick wasn’t twenty paces from the hotel when he set down the suitcase and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Head skyward and cigarette upturned, he struck a match and glanced around him, lighting it, inhaling and taking in the scene.

 

Kathryn took a breath, waiting for fat-faced detectives with bad shoes and G-men with bullhorns and billy clubs to come out from the sewers.

 

But nothing happened as she watched the big, broad back of George, in a two-tone summer shirt and tie, wearing two-tone shoes and a fashionable Panama tilted into his eyes, strolling along in the opposite direction, growing closer to Kirkpatrick, who was trying to remain cool and low-key. She could almost see the bastard shaking.

 

George passed by the Cadillac, and, with nothing to it, gave her a wink.

 

Five feet from Kirkpatrick, George R. Kelly said: “I’ll take that grip.”

 

Goddamn, she loved him. She loved that smooth, honeyed way he gave directions. I’ll take that grip . . . She’d remember that forever.

 

Kirkpatrick was frozen, staring at him. Kathryn leaned into the window and poked the barrel of the gun out of the car, finger on the trigger, teetering over the edge so that nobody could see it even if they were walking close.

 

“Hurry up,” her husband said.

 

“How do I know you’re the right party?”

 

“Hell, you know damn well I am.”

 

“Two hundred grand is a lot of money,” Kirkpatrick said. She could tell his mouth was dry when his voice cracked a bit. “We are carrying out our part of the agreement to the letter. What assurances have we that you’ll do what you promise?”

 

“Don’t argue with me,” George said, nodding to a row of cars across the street. “The boys are waiting.”

 

“When can we expect Mr. Urschel home?” he asked. “I’m going back to the hotel to telephone his wife. What shall I tell her?”

 

“You shall tell her that this is money well spent.”

 

Kirkpatrick set the bag at George’s two-tone shoes.

 

George bent down and grabbed the handle, and as he reached for it Kathryn shuddered, tongue moving across her upper lip and tasting her sweat.

 

“Wait,” Kirkpatrick said. “Wait one moment. You tell me definitely what I can say to Mrs. Urschel.”

 

“He’ll be home within twelve hours,” George said, the suitcase in his right hand. “Now, you turn and walk back to the La Salle and don’t look back. Whatever you do.”

 

George remained on the sidewalk for a good ten paces and then turned back to the Cadillac, Kathryn crawling over the front seat into the driver’s side and cranking the big sixteen cylinders, both of ’em watching Kirkpatrick till he disappeared from view. She pulled out onto Linwood and then down to Harrison Street and kept on going south till they found the highway, and she drove for a good six hours, white-knuckled and laughing, with a big, fat moon—a “lucky moon,” is what she’d call it—overhead. They only stopped for gasoline and oil, and a couple of sandwiches and pickles wrapped in paper, ice-cold Coca-Colas in small green bottles.

 

She never left the money. She kept it on her lap after she and George traded places with the driving. George’s Panama slipped back far on his head, big, hairy arm hanging out the window. The brand-new radio picking up some signals and then going out, hearing some news about that one-eyed flier Wiley Post making it around the globe but nothing at all about Charles Urschel. There was no music in this dusty, godforsaken land, only preachers and blithering morons talking about the Bible and healing and the road to happiness.

 

“We’re on that road right now, aren’t we, Kit?”

 

“You’re goddamn right.”

 

She smoothed her long fingers over the Gladstone, peeking every once in a while at the stacks and stacks of money, the scent of it making her mouth water. She smoothed it some more and rocked that bag back and forth.

 

A little past midnight, in some no-name town south of Wichita, George pulled into a motor lodge and rang for the manager. The manager was an old woman with a pinched face who said she sure was glad to get a nice married couple and asked them three times if their children were in the machine. And Kathryn gave her an eye like “Beat it,” although the old woman didn’t quite get it and kept on puttering around till Kathryn had to slam the door in her face.

 

They were wrung-out, road-tired, nerve-frazzled, and finally alone.

 

George locked the door behind them. They hadn’t brought a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. She carried the grip, and George carried some Log Cabin bourbon.

 

They drank from some tiny glasses found in the bathroom. And they drank some more. Kathryn took a shower, and when she came out George was next to the bed counting the cash, splayed open from the spread to the sheets. Stacks of twenties had been laid out in row after row, and Kathryn walked to him, feeling lazy-eyed from the booze, and dropped her towel, seeing herself in the long mirror over George. George sat astride a ladder-back chair, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, and his eyes moved up from the money and to his naked wife.

 

He smiled.

 

She stretched and fell back into the cash, some of the twenties knocked up into the air with a woosh, and she thought George might’ve been sore. But she should’ve known better. He about tripped getting off his seat and wrestling for his belt, not even removing his socks, garters, and shoes as he turned off a lamp and mounted her. In the moonglow from the window, he took her hard from behind, making animal grunts and saying how much he loved her and how beautiful she was, and all that tripe, as she pushed back hard against him and stretched out her arms before her, her finely manicured hands breezing through a stack of bills and making sure not a single one of ’em was marked.

 

They did it once in the bed, and then she straddled him in the chair. He looked good in the moonlight, like a lantern-jawed hero, and she liked the way the glow made her skin soft and white and young. Her arms and legs reached around George R. Kelly. Her hands clutching stacks of twenties as she rode him.

 

“I love you, Kit. I sure love you.”

 

“I love you, too,” she said, soft and meaning it, “you dumb ape.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

12

 

Harv’ey watched Boss Shannon toss feed from a metal bucket to his chickens, those pin-eyed creatures scratching and squawking and shit-ting all around them. Boss moped and looked down at his brogan shoes when the bucket fell empty, standing there, hens pecking at his feet and at the empty ground, when he finally raised his head and asked: “Where’d you find him?”

 

“He was wandering in the pasture,” Harvey said, studying Boss’s face and coolly slipping his right hand into his pocket, squinting into the early morning. “His feet were all cut up, and he was talking to himself. I couldn’t make out a thing he was saying till we got him back to the car. Urschel thought I was Tom Slick. Imagine that. King of the Wildcatters.”

 

“You kill him?”

 

Boss thought of himself as a hero, the salt of the earth, a hearty country man bred of solid stock, with years of wisdom behind him. But Harvey Bailey only saw a white-haired old fool who was greedy and reckless and would sell out his own boy for a nickel. Harvey studied the man’s beaten face and drooped shoulders until Boss grew restless in the open yard, the empty bucket shaking in his hand.

 

“You gonna kill me?” Boss asked. “’Cause if you are, I need to talk to Ora just a moment. There are things that need tending, and I’d prefer if I could write my own eulogy.”

 

“How much are they getting?” Verne Miller asked, hopping down from the front porch of Shannon’s house. He wore a big .45 in his waistband and a freshly pressed shirt.

 

“I don’t rightly know.”

 

“What was that hog’s name?” Harvey asked.

 

“I believe it was President Hoover,” Miller said. “I never saw a hog corn-hole a man before, but I believe it could happen. I think he liked the way you smelled. Imagine that wet snout on the back of your neck, Boss.”

 

“Sweet Jesus.”

 

“How much?” Harvey asked.

 

“Two hundred.”

 

“What?”

 

“Two hundred thousand.”

 

“Don’t lie to us.”

 

“I swear on it.”

 

“Whew.”

 

“What are they going to do with Urschel?”

 

“Turn ’im loose,” he said. “They don’t mean no harm to him.”

 

Harvey looked to Miller. Miller shrugged.

 

“So they’re coming back?” Harvey asked.

 

“Of course.”

 

“And we’ll all have a meet,” Harvey said.

 

“Don’t seem right,” Boss Shannon said, gaining a sense of himself and splatting some tobacco juice into the dust. “Don’t seem fair.”

 

 

 

 

 

“YOU THINK HE’S DEAD, DON’T YOU?” KIRKPATRICK ASKED.

 

“If you study on the worst, the worst will happen,” Jones said. “They were never gonna release him in Kansas City. These are some pretty cunning men we’re dealing with. Real professionals.”

 

“You think they’re mad at me? For bringing you along?”

 

“If they’d been really spooked,” Jones said, “they wouldn’t have made the drop.”

 

“Tell me again what they said on the telephone.”

 

“He called me a fat old man. How do you like that?”

 

It was the middle of the night when the Sooner cut through south Missouri and over the Oklahoma state line, and not once had Kirkpatrick taken a drink. The whole ordeal seemed to have bled the nervousness from him.

 

“Maybe he was talking about someone else,” Kirkpatrick said.

 

The all-nighter was empty, and Jones stretched out his boots on the seat in front of him. He had a notebook open on his lap, and in the flickering artificial light he worked on a report to Hoover about the whole caper, from the time the kidnappers made contact through the letter to the drop just a few hours ago. The exchange had happened so quickly after Kirkpatrick had stepped from the Yellow Cab that Jones had lagged behind, and when he’d caught up on the street the Gladstone had already been snatched with Kirkpatrick barely seeing a thing.

 

Kirkpatrick had described the man. The same one Berenice Urschel had described as the big fella with the machine gun. About six feet. Foreignlo oking.

 

“I should’ve done something,” Kirkpatrick said. “If I’d brought my gun I could’ve forced them to take me to Charlie. If he’s dead, I’ll never forgive myself. I let down the family.”

 

“If you’d acted like a fool, then he would be dead.”

 

Kirkpatrick nodded. His eyes looked hollow, the skin on his face stretched to the bone.

 

“Like I said, these men are professionals. They had a solid plan. They carried it out and got their money. Now they’ll just look for a safe place to turn him loose.”

 

“What if he knows too much?”

 

“Quit studying on the worst and the what could be,” Jones said, snapping the notebook closed and placing it back in his satchel. “All we can do is wait it out. Mrs. Urschel will need a strong man with some horse sense.”

 

The train clattered and clicked and jittered down the line. Artificial light shone in ramshackle towns and went dark in vast stretches of country, empty and barren.

 

“What if he’s not back in twelve hours?”

 

Jones shuffled in his seat, reaching for his father’s gold watch. “We won’t know for another four hours.”

 

“But if he’s not back by morning . . .” Kirkpatrick said, the lights in the train car going out and then coming back on. The horn sounded lonely and bovine along the tracks, making their presence known in all that blackness. The moon disappeared under a thick blanket of clouds from the west.

 

“Then you can worry.”

 

“What if Charlie can identify them? What if he can lead you back to their hideout?”

 

Jones leaned back into his hard wooden seat and reached for his Stetson. He laid the hat over his eyes and crossed his arms across his chest. “Soon as he comes home, we get to work. Just think about that Kirk. Until then, this fat old man needs some shut-eye.”

 

The train sounded again, and Jones drifted off to sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

KATHRYN SLAMMED THE CADILLAC DOOR WITH A TRIP AND A laugh, feeling about nineteen with a honeymoon glow, while she followed George—him telling the same joke he’d been repeating for the last two hundred miles—up onto Boss Shannon’s crooked porch, not seeing Boss, only Albert Bates. Bates just looked at George and slowly shook his head, and she saw George’s face change in an instant, and he grabbed the screen door that slammed behind him. Inside she heard raised voices and arguing.

 

Bates stepped in front of her and put up a hand. But Kathryn tossed it aside and followed George on in, past all of Ora’s knickknacks and collector spoons and glasses she’d gotten for free at movie shows, shelved above their brand-new RCA. Her fists were clenched down below her sides, and she marched right next to George, who was talking to that bastard Harvey Bailey.

 

Bailey sat at her momma’s kitchen table, foot up on a chair and holding a cane. He had a preacher’s smile on his face as he was trying to talk in a cool, relaxed voice about George coming to his senses.

 

“Harvey, why the hell are you still here?” she asked.

 

“George,” Bailey said, motioning with his cane, “get her ass out. This is man talk, and we don’t need your wife to discuss business.”

 

“There’s no business, you big-nosed moron,” she said.

 

“Mr. Charles F. Urschel is some kind of business.”

 

Kathryn stopped, and she could hear her own breathing. Her fists worked at her sides, and she looked at Bailey with a clenched jaw, but she said sweetly, “Have you gone screwy?”

 

“Mr. Urschel is ready to get home,” Bailey said. “Had a real scare yesterday when he decided to take a little walk. But we got him a drink, and he’s gone back to sleep. All ready for a drive.”

 

“Don’t you even think about muscling in on this, you goddamn lousy, worthless sack of shit.”

 

“George,” Harvey said, using the cane to stand. “Please. I don’t discuss business with women. Give the lady a boot.”

 

George reached around her waist, and Kathryn relaxed for a moment, thinking George was going to draw her close and tell Bailey to go fuck himself. But instead he picked her up off her feet and tried to carry her out of the house. She broke free and ran for Bailey, wanting to wring his neck and scratch his eyes out. George caught her and hauled her backward, her heels digging deep into a rug all the way out to the porch, where he tossed her out like an unwanted cat.

 

She landed on her butt and stared up into Albert Bates’s mug.

 

“If that don’t beat all.”

 

“I saw it comin’,” Bates said.

 

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

 

“I thought you saw it coming, too.”

 

“What do they want?”

 

“A third.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Sixty-six thousand.”

 

“They can go fuck themselves.”

 

“I agree,” Bates said. “But now they have Mr. Urschel.”

 

“He’s not with Potatoes?”

 

“The boy’s got him, but he’s scared of Miller.” Bates shook his head and tossed a butt onto the porch. He ground it up real good with the heel of his shoe.

 

“The cut’s gonna get a little deeper, too,” Bates said. “Bailey wants George to use Kid Cann’s outfit in Saint Paul for the wash.”

 

“That lousy Jew? Who in their right mind would trust him?”

 

“Bailey says he’s honest. He’s usin’ him for his own stash.”

 

“That’s a hell of a recommendation.”

 

George busted out of the front door, red-faced and sweating, and not the joking boy from the car ride. He grabbed Kit’s hand and walked her way the hell out from Boss’s house into the parched land where Boss grew his paltry crops. The dry and cracked ground still held the bent and dry stalks of corn blowing slightly in the hot wind. The old windmill twittered and twirled like the hands of a clock wound too tight.

 

“Listen to me,” George said, pulling her hands together at the wrist. “Listen. I talked him down to ten grand. They drive Urschel back.”

 

Kit shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She breathed in through her nose and kept on crying, goddamnit. Like some kind of baby.

 

“Kit.”

 

“You pussy.”

 

“Kit.”

 

“Don’t you dare take it in the ass from that son of a bitch,” she said.

 

“It’s been decided.”

 

“Among men?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I think you and your buddies from the Green Lantern Saloon are about as tough as a sewing circle,” she said. She grabbed the back of George’s big neck and pulled him in close to where their noses touched. Both of them were breathing hard from all the talk and excitement and the heat. Far off in the trees, some cicadas clicked and whirred. An old hound came loping out from the barn and lay down at George’s feet, but Kathryn kept on. “I know. I know.”

 

“What?”

 

“Kill him.”

 

“I can’t kill Harvey.”

 

“Not Harvey,” she said. “Urschel. You go with that dumb yegg like you’re okay with the deal. And when he takes you to Urschel, I want you to take out that .38 and put a hole right in the center of that rich man’s head. I never wanted you to take him back anyway. He can make you and Albert. He’s been to my momma’s house. He’s eaten her chicken, for fuck’s sake.”

 

George stood there in the heat with his mouth wide open.

 

Kathryn leaned in and gave him a big kiss on his stubbled mug. She kissed it again and again until his mouth closed and his eyes focused, seeing the sense in what she’d said.

 

“Do it,” she said. “Go do it now.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

13

 

 

Monday, July 31, 1933

 

Charlie had resigned himself to his own death for some time. He’d pretty much made sense and order of the affair after meeting up with Tom Slick in the wilderness and now being chained again in this blind purgatory; he knew these people were going to punch his ticket real soon. But life had been good and exciting. He’d been a successful man, raised a good family, and after becoming a widower did the sensible thing in marrying Berenice and joining their fortunes. He would not be maudlin about the day or try to conjure up a prayer. When that bullet hit his brain, he’d just be closed for business, and he knew damn well that time would continue. He just wished like hell he could remember what Tom Slick had told him out there in the vast stretches of land after he’d touched his staff to that parched earth and a black pool of oil had formed at his feet. He’d wanted Charlie to get off his knees and follow him up and over that hill, but as Charlie’d tottered and stumbled, Tom’s staff held high, he’d fainted and fallen and dropped in and out of consciousness, looking right into the face of that prize bull with a white face. That’s when Tom Slick changed into the figure of a limping man with silver hair and a bandanna across his face, saying, “Well, hello there, Mr. Urschel. Goin’ someplace?”

 

The old shack’s door squeaked open, and he was unchained again.

 

Here we go.

 

Charlie found his feet, holding on to the posts of a metal bed. He was told to turn around and take the bandages from his eyes. He complied and was led to a crude wooden bench, where he sat down.

 

He heard a click, and before his blurry eyes appeared the long, sharp blade of a straight razor. He wanted to think of a prayer but just couldn’t think of one that fit the situation.

 

He took a breath and swallowed, knowing it would be his last.

 

But instead of feeling the blade across his neck, he saw a mug of hot lather slid onto the table, and he looked up into the mirrored image of a man he didn’t recognize. Sure, he knew the features and eyes, they’d been with him since birth. But the gauntness and salt-and-pepper beard were those of a much older man.

 

“Shave those whiskers,” the big man said. “You look like a goddamn tramp. Whoa. Don’t turn around. Don’t you dare turn around. You know how this dance is done. We’ll bring you a change of clothes and a hat. It’s a new straw hat, and I’m pretty sure I got the size right.”

 

Charlie nodded.

 

He was free. They were taking him back.

 

He looked into the rust-flecked image of himself and lathered his face in the hot light coming from the west window. The razor was dull and old, and his whiskers took a good bit of pulling and coaxing till they’d be shaved away. Cuts and all, he felt like a hundred-dollar bill.

 

There was a knock on the door, and Charlie was told to face the wall.

 

His eyes were retaped, and he took the procedure like a sick man takes the dressing of his wounds. He heard the weathered voice of the old man now tell him that he had a fresh shirt and pants. He’d brought back the shoes he’d worn here.

 

Charlie didn’t answer. What was he supposed to do? Thank him?

 

He just nodded and stood there, blind and dumb. The most well-read man of women’s literature in the country.

 

And then he felt a pair of bony arms wrap his body and pull him tight, and an onion breath in his face told him, “You be careful, Mr. Urschel. Everything’s all right. Yes, sir. God bless you.”

 

The door opened and closed again.

 

“They’s gettin’ the automobile ready,” said Potatoes. “Mr. Urschel, how ’bout a smoke for ole time’s sake? I brung you a real good one. I can fetch you some hot coffee, too. It was fresh this mornin’.”

 

“Son?”

 

“Yes, Mr. Urschel?”

 

“You can stick that cigar up your ass,” Urschel said. “Tell that son of a bitch I want to be taken back to my home right now.”

 

 

 

 

 

“I’M NOT KILLING CHARLIE URSCHEL AT YOUR FOLKS’ PLACE.”

 

“Can you think of somewhere better?” Kathryn asked.

 

“For five grand, the boys will take Urschel back to Oklahoma City like we promised,” George said. “That’s on the level.”

 

“Fuck no.”

 

“Harvey said if we don’t agree to the deal, they’ll just let Urschel out close by where he can lead the law back to the farm,” George said. “They said your dumb stepdaddy lost ’im and they found ’im wandering the road to Damascus nuttier than a squirrel, so they’re claiming they’re owed something.”

 

“Bullshit.”

 

“I know,” George said. “But Miller ain’t gonna let him go without a fight. What are you gonna do?”

 

“You’re gonna tell Harvey we’ll pay out five grand for a finder’s fee. And I’ll tell him to go fuck himself.”

 

“Kit.”

 

The boys worked out some kind of screwy handshake deal about meeting up at the Green Lantern, where they’d get their cut and change out the rest. Turns out those damn Jews wanted twenty percent to turn the bills, but Bailey was convinced the ransom money serial numbers had been recorded. And, of course, that was something that never even crossed the minds of George and Albert. George only thought a lot about how to spend the dough, not a thing about marked bills.

 

“Are we still gonna kill ’im?” she asked.

 

“We meaning me.”

 

“Either way.”

 

“Let me think,” George said.

 

“I’ll hold my breath.”

 

They left the next afternoon, and sometime past ten o’clock, it seeming like they’d been riding forever since Paradise, George slowed right outside the Norman city limits. He didn’t speak, neither of them being dumb enough to make a sound with Charlie Urschel all trussed up on the backseat floorboard.

 

George had finally gotten up the nerve. He stopped the big car, and they got out to whisper to each other.

 

“Why here?”

 

“You want to do it in your own backyard?”

 

“Over there,” she said. “Behind that billboard.”

 

A small light shone on a billboard of a little nigger boy eating a huge slice of watermelon and a white man with big clean choppers telling the boy to BRUSH WITH COLGATE, SAMBO!

 

George got back behind the wheel, and they followed a narrow, rutted path that jumped up and over some railroad tracks and crossed down into a wide, endless scrap-metal yard. Big, fat stacks of junked cars and oil barrels and wagon wheels sat in useless, rusted heaps. It had just started to rain, a few drops splatting the Cadillac’s windshield, but when he stopped the car and killed the engine the heavens sure opened up.

 

George just sat there like he was trying to figure out how to start necking. Kathryn crossed her arms over her chest and slid down in her seat. She stared straight ahead and bit into her cheek.

 

George reached for his hat with a sigh and crawled out of the big car. He opened the rear door and pulled Urschel out by his bound wrists and marched him down a narrow space between the walls of rusted cars, down an endless path, and out of sight of the windows.

 

Kathryn was damned if she wanted to see it anyway. Because if she was ever called to court about being there when Mr. Charles F. Urschel, president of the Tom Slick Oil Company, was killed, she could look that prosecutor right in the eye and say she didn’t see a goddamn thing.

 

The rain fell harder, the first bit of it she’d seen in months, sounding like impatient fingers drumming on the desk. And there was nothing but all that silver pinging on that big midnight blue hood of the Cadillac, Kathryn looking straight ahead past that old silver Indian and leaning forward, squinting to see just a motion or a bit of something. Son of a bitch.

 

Only rain and deep night. Rusted coils and spindles and gears. Old engines and parts of old machines. Stoves and toasters. Useless stuff from machines no one cared to recall.

 

What if someone was to come along? What if the owner of this goddamn graveyard was to come out of his hole and want to know who was driving this beautiful piece of machinery into his personal shithole? Goddamn, if it wasn’t raining, she’d go out and grab George, and, if he hadn’t done the deed, she’d take the damn gun and kill the bastard herself instead of sitting in the car like a dog and being left in Shit City . . . BLAM.

 

BLAM. BLAM.

 

Three sounds. Three strobe patterns.

 

The figure and shape of that big mug coming back through the wrecks, fedora down over his eyes, gun hanging loose and dirty by his side, and marching straight for the car and slamming the door hard.

 

“Did you do it?”

 

He didn’t answer.

 

“We shoulda buried him in a barrel of lime,” she said.

 

He cranked the sweet Cadillac and leaned forward to see through the whole goddamn mess till he bumped up and over the crest of the old rails and back onto the highway, fishtailing and sliding and heading north again.

 

“Saint Paul?”

 

“I gave my word.”

 

“To a thief and a killer.”

 

“Verne Miller is a war hero, Kit.”

 

“How did it feel?”

 

“Why don’t you put a sock in it?”

 

“He was your first, wasn’t he?”

 

“Well.”

 

“Well, how did it feel?”

 

“Like something that had to be done.”

 

“Amen.”

 

“Turn on that lamp and read the map,” he said. “And why don’t you shut up till we get back to Saint Paul.”

 

 

 

 

 

JONES FINISHED WITH HIS REPORT, PECKING IT OUT ON AN L. C. Smith at the Federal Building and sliding it into the mail pouch to Washington. He grabbed his Stetson and returned to the mansion, only to receive a cable from Hoover chewing him out for not being in direct contact during the entire affair. Jones reread the cable, the words chapping his ass, and tossed it in the garbage, following Doc White to the front stoop under the portico, where the newsmen had turned the front lawn into a small tent city.

 

The pallor inside the house made it feel like a goddamn wake. Urschel should’ve been home hours ago.

 

The papers ran phone lines into a wild switchboard under an Army tent. Some of the newspapermen had now brought their desks and were sitting with their feet propped up and taking calls, all the while sweating through their shirts and ties, living through the long, hot night and all day with nothing to add to the Urschel story.

 

Tom Slick, Jr., and Charles Urschel, Jr., both about fifteen or sixteen, were back from a fishing trip in Mexico. And Betty Slick had decided to a bake a lemon pie for Agent Colvin, seeing to it that he ate at least two slices to make sure it was to his liking.

 

When there was nothing left to do, the family just sat in the salon and waited in silence. Every ring of the phone was like a jolt of electricity.

 

At nightfall, the wind blew in from the west and the rains came. The first rains in months, and Jones watched from the stoop as the newsmen scampered away, grabbing for their typewriters and copy, chasing stray notes and fallen hats. Tents tumbled down the road, and reporters and cops scrambled for their automobiles.

 

Colvin approached the men with a smile, watching the show.

 

“How was that pie?” Doc White asked.

 

Colvin’s face grew crimson. The rain streamed hard and violent across the road and atop the car hoods.

 

“She’s a fine young lady.”

 

“She sure has a crush,” Jones said.

 

“She’s just a girl.”

 

“How old are you?”

 

“Twenty-seven,” Colvin said.

 

“At twenty-seven?” Jones asked. “I was already married. That was back in aught-seven. I’d left the Rangers and joined up with Customs.”

 

Thunder and lightning, a full-out gully washer. Large tree branches shook and small freshly planted trees bent in the harsh wind. Jones took off his hat in fear of losing it.

 

“Y’all worked the border?” Colvin asked.

 

“Rode that river half my life.”

 

“You, too?” he asked White.

 

Doc White nodded.

 

“You ever see Pancho Villa?”

 

White and Jones smiled.

 

“Yeah, we knew Villa,” Jones said.

 

“You met him?”

 

“Sure thing,” Jones said.

 

“He was a real cutthroat.”

 

“Pancho?” Jones said. “One of the most pleasant sorts you’d ever meet. Would you say, Doc? He was an honorable man. Maybe what got him killed.”

 

They stood there and watched the rains for a while, Colvin and Doc White smoking cigarettes. It was black now, the sun probably not down but the dark clouds smudging out everything and keeping the neighborhood in a queer purple-black glow that usually preceded a tornado.

 

“The Kansas City office said the telephone call to the Muehlebach came from a local movie house,” Colvin said. “They sent an agent to the Newman Theater but came up with nothing.”

 

Jones rubbed his face with a handkerchief and cleaned thumbprints off his glasses.

 

“He should have been back hours ago,” Colvin said.

 

Jones nodded. He could see clearer without the smudges, the rain softening a bit, a heavy heat and humidity lifting from the ground.

 

“If they turn him loose,” Jones said, “it won’t be close to here. We’ll have to wait for Urschel.”

 

“When do we start to look?”

 

“Let’s give it till morning,” Jones said. “If he doesn’t show, we’ll understand the situation.”

 

A pack of newspapermen holding black umbrellas approached the front porch and shouted up a couple questions for the agents. Someone inside had tipped them off about the ransom drop, and, boy, they were angry it had taken them almost twenty-four hours to hear about it.

 

Was it really a million dollars?

 

Some people say the kidnappers may have taken the Lindbergh baby.

 

Agent Jones, they call you an Ace Investigator. Is it true you tracked down the last of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and forced Butch Cassidy down to Bolivia?

 

Jones ignored them, loaded his pipe, and strolled down the steps into the soft rain with Doc and climbed into the car supplied to them. They ate supper at the Skirvin, dropped by the local office for any new communiqués, and then headed back to Eighteenth Street and the now-familiar mansion. As the night wore on, the rains continued, and Mrs. Urschel turned on the radio just in case a report in some other state was to come over the wire. It took a few moments for the unit to heat up, and Jones found a comfortable place on the couch under that life-size portrait of Tom Slick, and smoked his cherry tobacco and listened to the Pabst Blue Ribbon Show on the radio, someway feeling odd that the nation was okay with alcohol again after spending so many years going after bootleggers.

 

The Urschel and Slick boys—dog-tired and sick from grief and worry—turned in some hours later. And in hushed whispers by the radio, Betty Slick told Agent Colvin that cotillion or joy of any type had to be canceled. And they soon left, too, and Jones didn’t study on it long. And then it was just Berenice Urschel, and the intimacy of them sitting so close with so few in the salon made Jones stand and walk into the kitchen.

 

She’d been crying a long time and seemed empty of tears and wasteful talk.

 

He poured a cup of coffee and noted the hour on a clock, growing close to midnight. He’d check in with the boys on the night guard and leave some orders. And then he’d head back to the Skirvin for a few hours of rest. He’d shave and be back here before sunrise.

 

That’s when he heard the commotion at the back door. One of the local agents was arguing with a man who wanted to come inside.

 

“Mister,” the agent said. “You better turn right back around and get back with the other newspapers.”

 

“But I’m not a reporter,” said the man wearing a straw hat and soaked short-sleeved shirt.

 

“No, he’s not,” said Jones with a smile, offering his hand. “Mr. Urschel, we’ve been waiting on you. My name’s Jones.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

14

 

What the hell, George?” Kathryn said. “Urschel’s alive? You lied. I can’t believe you lied to me, you rotten son of a bitch.” George mumbled something, his mouth full of eggs and ham, at a ham-and-eggs, no-name joint in some no-name town. Kathryn wasn’t even sure what state they were in. But they sure were hungry and had stopped off on the ride north when they’d seen the hand-painted signs for EATS, REST-ROOMS, GAS. When she’d come back from the can, she’d seen the front of a Kansas City Star someone left with a nickel tip. URSCHEL FREED.

 

Son of a bitch.

 

“What did you say?” she asked.

 

He finished chewing, and leaned in and said real low, “Excuse a fella for not wanting the Chair. What’s the point of stirring the pot? We got what we wanted. Why risk it? ’Sides, he almost shit his drawers running away.”

 

Kathryn read on about Charles F. Urschel, head of the Tom Slick Oil Company, bravely making his way from a scrapyard outside Norman to Classen Barbecue, where he calmly got a cup of coffee and telephoned for a cab. He paid the driver a small tip, the newspaperman drawing out that fact to show he was cheap, and was stopped at the back door of his house by a federal agent who didn’t recognize his face.

 

“Says here the kidnappers gave him ten dollars,” she said. “Is that true?”

 

“Why don’t you go ahead and broadcast it after Little Orphan Annie?”

 

“Ten whole dollars. You are a sucker.”

 

“Who’s that little chatter box?” George sang. “The one with pretty auburn locks?/ Whom do you see? / It’s Little Orphan Annie.”

 

Kathryn frowned and fished a pack of Luckies from her purse, lit one with shaking hands, and used the ruby red tip of her index finger to skip from story to story. Charles Urschel’s big, dumb hangdog face took up most of the space above the fold.

 

She smoked the cigarette down to a nub and squashed it out as the waitress in a little paper hat refilled her coffee. George asked for some more toast.

 

She lit another Lucky and leaned back into her seat. The diner was empty, far too early in the morning for normal folks, and she leaned into the paper and read on. “Says right here that ‘FEDERAL ACE GUS T. JONES LEADS MANHUNT.’ You ever heard of him? Says he tracked down the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and was a personal friend to Pancho Villa. Jesus H. How old is this guy?”

 

“Too old to catch us,” George said with a wink. “I bet he still rides a horse.”

 

“Says here he has a government airplane at his disposal.”

 

She turned the page and above an advertisement for Lux soap—Is Your B.O. Offending Your Husband?—was a picture of the Federal Ace. Wire-framed glasses, fat man with thinning hair. “Well, son of a bitch.”

 

“What?”

 

“It’s the bastard from the Sooner,” she said, laughing. “I knew he was the law. Damn, I knew it.”

 

“The one with Kirkpatrick?”

 

“No, George. The nigger porter.”

 

“They just put that stuff in the paper to rile us up,” he said. “Eddie Bentz says nervousness will trip you up every time. Keep your mind clear and everything is copacetic.”

 

“You can’t even spell copacetic.”

 

“Come on now, Kit.”

 

“I mean it,” she said. “Ed Weatherford is still out there, too. You know he’s gonna turn rat.”

 

“Ed Weatherford doesn’t know diddly-squat,” George said, scraping some egg onto his toast. He pointed the loaded toast at her. “You wanted me to drive all the way to Fort Worth just to kill a fella ’cause you don’t like his smile.”

 

“He’s a snake.”

 

“Oh, Ed’s all right,” he said, grinning. “I think he’s a little sweet on you, too.”

 

“You sure are a bright boy, George.”

 

The waitress walked back from the kitchen with more toast and jam and butter. George smiled and winked at her, and the woman blushed because, hell, she had to be at least forty and hard and weathered. But Kathryn Kelly was smart enough to know that There but by the grace of God, because if she didn’t have a plan, she damn well could be slinging hash in a few years.

 

“The beauty with these kidnap deals is that no one has to die,” George said, wiping his mug with a napkin. “You take the gravy from some rich mug who’s swimming in cash while average hardworking Joes out there can’t afford a cup of coffee. It’s a solid, respectable line of work.”

 

“Since when are you hardworking?”

 

“How long has it been since you wanted for anything?”

 

“You made me leave Chingy.”

 

“We don’t need a little yapping dog on this excursion,” he said.

 

“How long is this gonna take?”

 

“Couple days tops.”

 

“And you trust this Kid Cann?”

 

“He’s a businessman.”

 

“He’s a crook.”

 

“Harvey’s cashin’ in his chips with him, same as us.”

 

George nodded and straightened his short red tie. He looked off in the wide, empty space of the restaurant spreading out in a crazy chessboard of blue-and-white linoleum. The place smelled of cigarettes and frying bacon and coffee left on the burner too long. In the darkness outside the glass window, a long, sweeping arrow made of tiny lightbulbs beckoned in the weary traveler.

 

“Then what?” she asked. “When do we get the money back?”

 

George smiled. “We relax. Have some laughs.”

 

“I want to go back to Cleveland.”

 

“What the hell for? I want to take you down to Biloxi and put our feet in the sand. We can drink beer on the beach and go dancing on the boardwalk at night. I wouldn’t mind doing a little fishing, too.”

 

“Before we do anything, we have to pay off the Cadillac.”

 

“Are you joking?”

 

“Do you have any idea of how embarrassing it is to get all those telephone calls and telegrams about falling behind on those payments? When we bought that big baby out there, we said we’d be paying by year’s end in cash. And now we have it, I want to march right into that dealership and tell ’em to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

 

“That won’t prove a thing, Kit.”

 

“You got that damn loan in the name of Boss and Ora! You said your name was Mr. Robert G. Shannon.”

 

“Would you shut up.”

 

“You shut up.”

 

George let out a long stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. He looked her over like he was appraising just how long she’d keep this gag running, and the decision didn’t take long as he rested his meaty fist on the table, cigarette burning down to his hairy knuckles, and nodded. “Okay.”

 

“Okay what?”

 

“Okay, Saint Paul to trade with the Jews and then down to Cleveland so you can play big-time with that two-bit car salesman. Say, I know why you want to do this. You didn’t like the way his wife treated you when we had dinner with them. When you told her about the kind of gowns you liked, and she laughed a little like she didn’t believe you.”

 

Kathryn nodded. “She was mean to Chingy.”

 

“That goddamn rat shit on her Oriental rug.”

 

“It was an ugly rug.”

 

A few truck drivers walked in through the glass door, a bell jingling above their heads. More bacon frying. More loose talk. Cigarettes and coffee. Hash and eggs. Kathryn picked up the Star again and read back over the front page about the Urschel story.

 

“Does it bother you that your name isn’t here?”

 

“Are you crazy? That’s pretty much the point, sweetheart.”

 

“It bothers me,” she said. “I read a story last week about Jean Harlow coming to Kansas City to visit her family. They had her picture on the front of the paper just because she came to town. Now, that’s something.”

 

“She’s a damn movie star with big tits.”

 

“I’m prettier.”

 

“Maybe,” George said. “But she’s known.”

 

“And now because of us that fat old man is the Federal Ace.”

 

“So what?”

 

“So, it must be nice.”

 

“What’s that?” George asked, grabbing his hat and tossing down some coin. “To get your picture in the paper?”

 

“For everyone to know you,” she said. “Look at ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd. He’s like some goddamn Robin Hood.”

 

“To hell with Floyd.” George stood, tipping the fedora’s brim down over his dark eyes as he frowned at her. “Let’s see him ever pull a job like this.”

 

 

 

 

 

“HOW ’BOUT YOU HANDLE KID CANN,” VERNE MILLER SAID. “THAT little Jew has problems with me.”

 

“About what?” Harvey asked.

 

“One night at the Cotton Club, we had a little talk.”

 

“A talk?”

 

Verne Miller shrugged and scratched the back of his neck. They were out of the Buick now—Harvey always preferring to buy or steal big, solid Buicks—and they walked in the falling sunlight of an abandoned farm close to the Iowa line. Harvey’s heel felt stiff and sore, and he had some trouble keeping pace with Miller’s strong, long-legged gait.

 

“The Kid made a pass at Vi,” Miller said, staring straight ahead. His blue eyes like ice. “He told her he’d like to place his pecker right between her titties and ride her like a mule.”

 

“The Kid said that?” Harvey asked, lighting up a Chesterfield and fanning out the match. “I don’t even know what that means. ‘Like a mule’?”

 

“He’d been drinking.”

 

“What’d you say?”

 

“I don’t know,” Miller said, shrugging again. “I didn’t say much. Just stuck a .45 inside his mouth and asked if he’d like to see how little brains he’s got.”

 

“He may hold a grudge.”

 

“You think?”

 

“I do, Verne,” Harvey said. “Things like that can stay with a person.”

 

The hot wind off the barren earth felt good on the men’s faces, and you could smell the hard earth and dust and dry land. The farm had a familiar old L-frame and a big red barn with a roof painted with the words MERAMEC CAVERNS U.S. 66 STANTON MISSOURI. The shadows were long and smooth across the rough-hewn boards, and the sunlight painted the side of the barn in a soft yellow glow.

 

“Vi’s got you wrapped tight, Verne,” Harvey said. “And don’t take no offense in this, but if you don’t watch your pecker, she’s gonna lead you right into a trap.”

 

“What’s a man to do?”

 

“Love.”

 

“Yeah,” Miller said with that cruel, twisted mouth. “It’s worse than the Spanish flu.”

 

“Now, take George,” Harvey said. “That’s another matter. He can’t even see the trap he’s in.”

 

“The pussy trap.”

 

“Snap.”

 

“You’re going to thieve their money, aren’t you?” Miller asked.

 

Harvey smiled and pinched the Chesterfield between his thumb and forefinger. He shrugged a bit and smiled again.

 

“You’re gonna get the Kid to switch out the cash on the bank job with Kelly’s dough, and we’re going to take it all.”

 

“You got a problem with that?”

 

“I don’t have any love for those people.”

 

The Buick sat in the slanting shadow of two big silos crawling with vines. A couple Ford tractors lay rusted and turned upside down in a gully. As the men stepped on the porch, they found a busted door held upright by an old padlock. A note from the bank ruffled in the wind.

 

“This country is turning to shit,” Harvey said, snatching the notice from the tacks and tossing it on the ground.

 

“Everything is turning to shit.”

 

“They took my gas stations,” he said. “They took goddamn everything.”

 

“Who?”

 

“Fat men.”

 

“Who?”

 

“Men who feed at the trough of our goddamn sweat.”

 

“You’re talking like a communist,” Miller said.

 

“Maybe I am.”

 

“Communism is for suckers, too.”

 

“What do you believe in, Verne?”

 

“Myself,” he said, his face not changing expression.

 

Harvey Bailey excused himself and walked along the beaten porch of the house, the wind making rattling noises through the broken windows. A door kept drumming with the shotgun wind, and every one of Harvey’s steps through the haunted guts of the home was counted until he reached the back stairs and walked out onto that wide expanse of cleared land, an old familiar path now grown up with weeds and destroyed and hidden. But he could walk that path in his sleep, feeling that draw and pull to a shadowed little grove of walnut trees blooming with nuts wrapped in green.

 

You wouldn’t know it to see it. The headstone simply read J. HARVEY BAILEY / SEPTEMBER, 5 1920-JULY, 12 1923. Bailey felt a shooting pain as he got to his knees and pulled away the weeds and vines and straightened the small stone lamb, storm-beaten, and now resembling more rock than animal. He stayed there, smoothing away the moss with his hand-painted tie, until he heard Miller calling for him, and, using the solid trunk of the tree for balance, he got back on his feet.

 

“You think Harry Sawyer’s back up there?” Verne Miller asked as he walked close, toting a shovel.

 

“Where else would he go?” Harvey asked, rolling the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbow and lighting another cigarette. “We’ll head to the Green Lantern first thing. I sure wouldn’t mind one of his pork chop sandwiches.”

 

“And maybe Nina’s?”

 

“How can a man go to Saint Paul and not stop by and say hello to the girls?”

 

“Right here?”

 

“Right here,” Harvey said. “Hand it to me.”

 

Harvey Bailey felt the hot wind push a cloud over the sun, sliding a cool shadow over his face. He slid the tip of the shovel to the known spot and began to dig.

 

“How much is buried?” Miller asked.

 

“Just enough.”

 

 

 

 

 

JONES THUMBED SOME TOBACCO INTO HIS PIPE AND EYED Mr. Charles Urschel. Urschel’s face was gaunt and hollow, the flesh around his eyes reddened and blistered. He had changed into fresh clothes that morning—lightweight navy trousers and a white short-sleeved linen shirt. Jones could tell he’d showered and shaved, had his breakfast and coffee. But despite the morning routine, Urschel hadn’t stopped tapping his foot and checking his timepiece since he’d sat down.

 

Jones struck a match and got the bowl going, the cavernous study empty besides Jones and SAC Colvin. The young boy displaying his talents as notetaker, keeping quiet and letting Jones take the lead, the interview continuing from where they stopped late last night, when Berenice Urschel begged Jones to let her husband get some rest. Jones had complied, but then had shown up at six that morning, and had waited damn-near two hours until Urschel said he was ready.

 

“I hope this won’t take long.”

 

“Could take a while, sir.”

 

“I haven’t set foot at my company.”

 

“You’ll have some time this afternoon.”

 

“But I didn’t see anything,” Urschel said. “Everything I could know I told you last night. I even told you about the well and how bad that water tasted. You seemed to take great interest in the mineral quality of it last night. Perhaps that will lead to something.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Jones said, walking and smoking and moving about in the room, lined from bottom to top with leather-bound volumes of old stories and old tales of murder and adventure, and very serious men taking things very seriously. “Tell me about the boy.”

 

“He was a boy.”

 

“You said he went by ‘Potatoes.’ ”

 

“I doubt that was his real name. Probably something those crooks made up.”

 

“You never know,” Jones said. “I knew a boy in El Paso that everyone called ‘Turd Head.’ ”

 

“Well, I doubt the moniker.”

 

“But he watched you most?”

 

“He did.”

 

“And read to you?”

 

“He did. Yes.”

 

“What sorts of material?”

 

“Magazines.”

 

“What sort?”

 

Urschel was quiet for a moment and then said, “Ladies’ Home Journal. McCall’s. Frivolous things in which I had no interest.”

 

“Wasn’t your kind of reading?”

 

“It passed the time,” Urschel said. “The boy also had some kind of brochure on the World’s Fair and read from that quite often. In fact, I would say he was obsessed with it. Liked to read a portion about native dancers who dance in the nude.”

 

“Did he offer anything personal from the Fair?”

 

“Just that he planned on going.”

 

“Isn’t everybody?”

 

The more he smoked, the more Jones paced. A flurry of questions came to mind as he paced, smoke breaking and scattering with his steps.

 

“What about the old man?” Jones said. “You conversed with him?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“About?”

 

“Nothing of consequence. We had some bad weather the night before they released me. There was wind and rain, and I asked them if they had tornadoes.”

 

“What did they say?”

 

“Said they had a lot more tornadoes down in Oklahoma and Texas.”

 

“That was a plant,” Jones said with certainty. He strolled behind Urschel’s desk and pulled back a thin layer of drapes, seeing the newsmen gather around E. E. Kirkpatrick, who read a statement from the family that he’d typed out over breakfast. The statement basically read that Mr. Urschel didn’t recall a goddamn thing about his kidnappers, which was a view that old Charlie kept on sharing with Jones.

 

“Could you even sneak a peak? Of something? Anything?”

 

“A few days after they took me, I got the bandages loose. I was able to peer around a bit. They kept me in a shack, like I said. The outhouse was nearby.”

 

“Hold on,” Jones said. He sat at Urschel’s desk and pulled a small notebook from his satchel. “How many rooms in this shack?”

 

“Three?”

 

“Which way did the boards run in the house?”

 

“The boards?”

 

“Floorboards.”

 

“Judging on the heat from the sun,” Urschel said. “East and west.”

 

Jones nodded. “What about the outhouse? Which direction?”

 

“West,” Urschel said. “I’m sure of it. But, sir, I really don’t see the point in . . .”

 

Jones kept the pipe in his teeth and held up his left hand as he sketched a bit, adding the three rooms to a modest shack, an outhouse, the road Urschel had mentioned last night. That old well where they drew the mineral water. “Did you see animals?”

 

“Heard them,” Urschel said. “Pigs, chickens. The old man and the boy spoke of a prize white-faced bull, and I saw the animal’s face when I ran. It was about all I saw when I was running.”

 

“Sun blind?” Jones asked.

 

Urschel nodded. “I think I lost control of my mind a bit, too.”

 

“Happens with heat.”

 

“The boy spoke of a woman of loose character who lived nearby,” Urschel said. “He joked about it often.”

 

“What did he say?”

 

“Only that there was a teenage whore in the vicinity. I guess she only charged a quarter for intercourse.”

 

Jones nodded. He sketched some more, adding arrows and asking a bit more about where Urschel had heard the farm animals. The man had forgotten about an old cornfield and something he’d heard about a melon patch with fruit just turning ripe. Jones asked about the direction cars arrived from and how they departed, and then he came all the way back around and asked more about the storm and how long it lasted and what he did during the rains.

 

“I know the rain started before five-thirty.”

 

“And how’s that?”

 

“Well, at five-thirty is when the airplane would pass.”

 

“The airplane.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Urschel said. “I really must be going, Mr. Jones. Might we—”

 

“Tell me more about the aircraft.”

 

“An airplane would pass every day at nine in the morning and again about five-thirty,” he said. “I’d ask the boy for the time several minutes after the plane sounded so he wouldn’t get suspicious. But I didn’t think much of it. Planes fly all over this nation these days.”

 

“What about the rain?”

 

Urschel looked at him and crossed his legs. His face looked drawn, his dark eyes hollow and void.

 

“Did that second plane fly the day of the storms?”

 

Urschel looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his jaw. He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No, sir. I didn’t hear that plane.”

 

Jones nodded.

 

“Is that of importance?”

 

“Oh, yes, sir,” Jones said, puffing on the pipe. “It most surely is.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

15

 

They arrived in Saint Paul a little before nightfall. Kathryn knew the town, had lived there for a couple of frigid years in a crummy apartment with George, a real honeymoon special, with a Murphy bed and pullout ironing board, him talking her into that frozen wasteland because of his connection with Harvey Bailey, Verne Miller, and the dear departed Jelly Nash. Said they owed him, and that Saint Paul was a wide-open town, the kind of city where those goddamn yeggs could live without ever having to look over their backs. You paid off the detectives, the chief of police, and you were polished gold. Kathryn had liked Saint Paul okay right when George had first gotten out of Leavenworth, and she’d been dazzled a bit with those first few bank jobs—although now, thinking back, they didn’t make them rich—and how the big mug would take her out shopping on Main and to R. H. Bockstruck for some baubles and jewels. There were nights at the Parisian, where they had a dance floor as big as two football gridirons, and summers at Harry Sawyer’s place out on the lake, skinny-dipping under the moon. The blind pigs and speakeasies were on every city block and in basements, and when George would go down for a meet at the Green Lantern he’d bring her with him, decked out finer and more beautiful than any of those whores of Bailey’s or Nash’s. About the only one that could come close in looks was Vi Mathias, but Verne had put her on the run, and she wouldn’t be in Saint Paul. And maybe since Prohibition was long, dumb history, the whiskey and gin wouldn’t taste so damn good as when you knew you were doing something bad and wrong.

 

Sometimes those were the only things that felt like doing.

 

“You think he’s even here?” she asked.

 

“It’s his place.”

 

“It was his place,” Kathryn said, whispering. “It’s been a few years.”

 

“I know what I’m doing.”

 

“Did you ever meet the Kid?”

 

“Yeah, I met him.”

 

“Does he know you?”

 

“I said I met him.”

 

“Doesn’t mean he knows you,” she said. “You weren’t that known when we were up here. You were just the driver. I don’t think you made the papers once.”

 

George placed his big knuckles on the long glass cigar case and gave a low whistle. He called the tobacco shop steward over for a couple of these and a couple of those, and for that big solid-gold lighter, wondering if he could have it engraved.

 

“Are you even listening to me?”

 

The cigar steward grabbed what George pointed out and strolled back to the cash register and out of earshot. Toward the front of the cigar shop was a big, tall wooden Indian, standing dumb and silent and proud.

 

“You were the one who wanted to cut out the middlemen, so here we are. But now you want to doubt me and the plan, and now I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a smart idea. Do you have any idea how mad Verne and Harv are going to be when they learn we went to the Kid direct?”

 

“I just don’t see the logic in cutting those two fools in when they didn’t lift a finger.”

 

George shrugged and didn’t disagree. He walked over to the front counter—long stained wood and wavy glass—filled with hundreds and hundreds of cigars wrapped in rich, aged tobacco. The whole store smelled like the inside of an old cedar chest. Every few moments the bell above the door would jingle and in would walk a couple fellas, or a lone fella, and they’d nod to the steward and head back behind a curtain at the rear of the store. George plugged a cigar into the side of his mouth and thumbed his new lighter, having paid a big wad of cash for it. He smiled as he got the thing going, and told her to find a nice, comfortable chair and read the paper or something, he’d be right back.

 

And as much as it burned her up, she knew she couldn’t go behind the curtain, back to the cigar shop’s private club, where only dirty egg-sucking politicians, moneygrubbing bankers, and two-timing yeggs were allowed. All of ’em men, with their eye candy left on the settee to read the Saint Paul Star about the latest exploits of the Barker Gang and the Barrow Brothers, thousands of Joes showing up at a new agency for home loans, and about those big stores in Bay City, Michigan, being pummeled with stones for not jibing with the NRA work hours. Ain’t that a hoot. And there was Charles Urschel again, the sheriff in Oklahoma City criticizing the poor bastard for not running to a telephone when George released him. If Urschel had called me instead of a taxi when he was turned loose, the kidnappers wouldn’t have had a chance in a hundred to get away. It was raining so hard that only two roads away from Norman were passable, and he would’ve found them in less than ten minutes . . . She scanned the rest, but then her eyes caught the headline: TWO MILLION FOR CLARK GABLE. She passed on over Urschel and some bullshit about the police finding the shack where they’d hid out.

 

So the True Story of this shy and awkward farmer boy who came up from the low, who dreamed his dreams in a logging camp, who worked as an ad taker on a newspaper and as a clerk in a telephone company, fi nally to evolve as one of the greatest actors and the world’s greatest love on the screen, has knocked all records for “reprints” higher than a kite.

 

No kiddin’. True Story sold over two million issues just so the regular folks can read about Clark Gable. Kit could kind of see it but not see it, too. He had confidence and style, and good posture and height. But it would take some to get over those funny jug ears and the space between his teeth.

 

To the millions of younger men and women who are still dreaming their dreams while they go about the daily round of their ordinary work, this great True Story lends the start of hope without which those dreams cannot go on. And to the many thousands of older men and women who are enjoying their fi rst-time fruits of attainment, it lends courage to character, for in the amazing life of this eager young country boy who found himself suddenly without warning caught in the mesh of all the feminine wiles that Hollywood could produce, there has been the lure of enough temptations to shake the character of a saint.