Mountain is a government reserve, any illegal activities within the county that are subject to affecting it can be construed to come under injunction. So any federal judge can issue warrants, and they don't necessarily have to be served by federal officers. He can deputize local authorities. Becker's got a federal judge in Malvern in his pocket. There's your problem right there.'
'Damn!' said Owney. He knew right away that clipping a federal judge would not be a good idea, just as clipping a prosecuting attorney wouldn't, either. 'Can you reach him?'
'He's eighty-two years old and nearly blind. I don't think money, whores or dope would do the trick. Maybe if you snuck up behind him and said boo.'
'Shit,' said Owney.
'It's a pretty smart con,' said Hurst. 'I don't see how you can bring legal action against the federal government, and through that technicality Becker is essentially operating as a federal law enforcement officer. He's got the protection of the United States government, even if the United States government has no idea who he is.'
'Okay, find out all you can. I have to know what the hell is going on. And I have to know soon.'
Owney headed inside, where Jack McGaffery, the Horseshoe's manager, waited for him.
'Mr. Maddox, we never had a chance. They was just on us too fast. Poor Garnet, that boy never hurt a fly, and they blowed him out of his socks like a Jap in a hole.'
But Owney was less interested in the fate of Garnet than he was in the fate of the Horseshoe. What he saw was an admirably efficient job of ruination accomplished quickly. The roulette wheels and the craps tables could be replaced quickly enough, although a roulette wheel was a delicate instrument and had to be adjusted precisely. But the slots were the worst part.
Usually, the slots were simply hauled away to a police warehouse, stored a few weeks, then quietly reinstalled. Some of them had dozens of TO BE DESTROYED BY HSPD stickers on their backsides.
But this time, someone had walked along the line of machines and fired three or four tommy gun bullets into each. The heavy.45s had penetrated into the spinning guts of the mechanical bandits and blown them to oblivion. The Watlings looked like dead soldiers in a morgue, their glossy fronts cracked or shattered, their adornments of glass spider-webbed, their stout chests punctured, their freight of coins spewed across the floor. Reels full of lemons and cherries and bananas lay helter-skelter on the floor, along with springs and gears and levers. They were old Wading Rol-a-tops from before the war, though well maintained, gleaming and well bugged and tighter than a spinster's snatch, ever profitable. The Rol-a-tops, though, were the proletarians of the gambling universe. More obscenely, a Pace's Race, the most profitable of the devices, was included in the carnage. It was a brilliantly engineered mock track where tiny silhouettes of horses, encased in mahogany under glass, ran in slots against each other, and by the genius mechanics of the thing, the constantly changing odds whirled around a tote board, the odds themselves playing the horses. Its glass shattered, its elegant wood casing broken, its tin horses bent and mangled, the thing lay on its side, all magic having been beaten out of it.
Owney shook his head sadly.
'We kept people out,' said Jack. 'All the coins are still there. Them boys didn't get no coins, that's for sure.'
'But they got $35,000?'
'Sir, more like $43,800 and odd dollars.'
'Shit,' said Owney. 'And all the records.'
'Yes sir. But wasn't airy much in them sheets.'
Of course not. Owney wasn't foolish enough to keep sensitive documents in casinos.
'But sir,' said Jack. 'Here's something I don't understand.'
He pointed at the walls. Every ten or twelve feet, someone had whacked a hole with an ax. Owney followed the gouges, which circled the main room of the casino, continued up the stairs to Jack's looted office, and followed a track into both the gals' and the men's rest rooms.
Looking at the destruction in the women's room, he said finally, 'Who did this?'
'Well, it was an old guy. There was an old guy who came in after all the ruckus was done. He had a hatchet and he went around chopping holes in the wall while the younger boys chewed up the tables and gunned the slots.'
'What'd he look like?'
'like I say, Mr. Maddox, old man. Face like a bag of primes. Big old man. Sad-like. He looked like he seen his kids drownded in a flood. Didn't say much. But he was some sort of boss. Meanwhile, the tough guy supervised the cracking of the tables, and outside, Becker and his clerk handed out them news releases, answered some questions, posed for pictures. Then they all up and went. Nobody made no arrests.'
'Hmmmm,' said Owney. He had been caught flat-footed, and someone smart somewhere was behind it. That old man chopping at the walls. He was clearly someone who knew what he was doing. He had a sense of the one place Owney was vulnerable. You could raid on places in Hot Springs for years, and as soon as you closed one joint down, another would spring up, sustained by the river of money that was track betting. But the old man was looking for the wiring that would indicate the secret presence of the Central Book, where the phones poured their torrents of racing data, and Owney knew if he found it, he could dry Owney out in a fortnight.
Goddamn the wire! He was trying to get out of that business but he was still tied to it, it was still his lifeline, and he was still vulnerable to its predation.
One thing was for sure: next time he'd be ready.
'Jack, get Pap in here.'
When the old man came, Owney went to the point.
'I want 'em all armed now. Nothing goes easy anymore. They'll never have it as soft as they had it tonight. If they want a war, we'll give 'em a goddamned war. They got guns? We'll get bigger guns. Tell the Grumleys, they will get back for what was done to them tonight.'
'Wooo-oooooooo-doggies!' yelped the haggard old sinner, and danced a mad little jig there in the ruined casino.
Chapter 14
By three separate cars, the raid team arrived at the courtyard of the Best Tourist Court at around 9:30 P. M. The neon of the Best was spectacular: it washed the night in the fires of cold gas, in odd colors like magenta and fuchsia and rose around each cabin. It looked like a frozen explosion.
In this strange illumination, the men loaded magazines quietly, slipped into their bulletproof vests, checked the safeties, locked back actuators, tried to stay loose and cool and not get too excited. But it was hard.
Across the street they could see the looming shape of the old ice house, and next to it, the Horseshoe itself, somewhat rickety and wooden like most of the casinos built in the 1920s, with its blazing neon sign thirty feet high atop the roof: 30 SLOTS?INSTANT PAYOUT! and the double green neon horseshoes at each end of the sign.
'Hard to miss,' said D. A.
'It's not like a secret or nothing,' said one of the boys, possibly Eff?for Jefferson?up from the Georgia Highway Patrol. A designated tommy gunner, he was loading.45s into a stick magazine.
Earl was alive in ways he hadn't been alive for a year. He felt his eyeballs extra-sharp, he tasted the flavor of the air, his nerve endings were radar stations reading every rogue movement in the night sky. He walked around, checking, examining, giving this boy or that the odd nod or pat of encouragement.
Becker pulled in, with a clerk. He seemed especially nervous. He walked among the men smiling dryly, but he kept running his tongue over his gray lips. All he could think to say was 'Very good, very good, very good.'
Finally he approached the two leaders.
'I like it. They look sharp,' he said.
'It ought to go okay,' said the old man.
'You, Earl, you agree?'
'Mr. Parker's got it laid out real nice, sir,' said Earl.
'Okay. When it's clear, you send a boy out. At that moment I'll call HSPD and announce a raid in progress
