That is, except for the bartender.
Earl knew his man. The bartender reacted with his guts instead of his brain, and, alone among them, he spun and grabbed reflexively for a weapon under the bar.
Earl probably could have broken his arm with the sap. Instead, he thumped him lightly and perfectly, intercepting the plunging limb and striking it at the nearly fleshless bone along the arm's top.
'Ah!' the bartender groaned, driven to his feet by the agony of the blow that had turned the whole left-hand side of his body numb. He sat back, clasping the bruise to him and in pure animal terror recoiled and tried to go tiny and harmless.
'You be a good boy!' Earl warned.
Earl turned back and saw that the situation was now in complete control. Nobody else moved.
'You okay, Mr. Earl?' asked Slim.
'B'lieve I'm fine,' Earl said, taking his badge out of his pocket and pinning it to his lapel.
'You were one inch from catching a tommy gun burst in the guts,' one of the raiders said to the bartender, who still groaned at the pain.
Earl leaned around the bar, plucked out the pool cue and threw it across the floor. Then he pulled out the sawed-off pump, pointed it down, and jacked the pump hard, ejecting six twelve-gauge shells. He dumped the empty thing on the bar, its pump locked back to expose the unfilled chamber.
D. A. was there next.
'Now, ladies and gendemen, you just stand clear. We are from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and don't mean you any harm. You just relax and you'll be able to go on home in a minute.'
'Can we keep our winnings?'
'Anything on your person you may keep. Sorry, but anything on the tables will be confiscated by the Prosecuting Attorney's Office.'
There was some grumbling, but as the guns came down and the hands came down, everybody seemed to be making the best of it.
In another second Carlo Henderson appeared with a squawking guy in a white tux, hands cuffed behind him.
'Who the hell are you? What the hell is going on? I am Jack McGaffery, manager of the Horseshoe, and Owney Maddox is going to be plenty jacked at this.'
'Reckon he will be, sir. Are you aware there are illegal gaming devices on the property?'
'Naw, do tell? Never noticed a thing, there, Sheriff. By God, Owney Maddox will have your ass for this. You ask these folks. He won't?'
'Well, sir,' said D. A., 'you tell Owney Maddox if he wants to make an appointment with Mr. Becker, to go right ahead. Meanwhile, soon's we get these folks out of here, we're going to destroy the illegal?'
'Destroy! Jesus Christ, man, you must be crazy! Owney will hunt you to your last day on earth!'
'Don't think you get it yet, McGaffery. He ain't hunting us, we're hunting him. We're the new boys in town and by God, he will wish we'd never come. All right, fellows, let's get it done!'
They began to herd the citizens out the front doors, while a few other raiders moved the casino staff to one side. Earl stood watching and noted that Frenchy finally arrived from upstairs with his Thompson gun. He hadn't shot anyone yet; that was good.
'All right,' Earl commanded. 'Peanut, you bring the cars up close and we'll get the axes out and go to town. Y'all, you just sit down over there, and watch what we do so you can give Owney Maddox a good report. Mr. Becker will be here soon. We'll see if you're gonna be arrested or not. I want?'
Earl had a thought before him which was something like 'I want you to pay close attention to what a thorough job we do, because we're going to do a lot more thorough jobs before we're done,' which was meant for the casino staff as a note of intimidation for Owney Maddox and the Grumley boys. That way he'd know he had some problems and he'd get serious about them.
But that thought never got out.
Instead, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move that shouldn't move at all. It was a shape, a form, a shadow, and no clear oudine was visible, for it seemed to emerge from the back entrance in a flash of a second. Earl only recognized that it was a human form and that a hard, cold thing that rose at an angle above it was the double barrels of a shotgun.
Earl could not command himself to draw and fire. No man could move that fast from the rational part of his brain. He simply swept aside the coat, drawing the gun, his thumb flying to and pushing off the safety, his other hand clasping the grip and cradling the first hand, his elbows flying and then locking, almost as if he'd willed it rather than done it, and in the next billionth of a second the pistol reported loudly, kicked against his tight double- handed grip and ejected a spent brass shell.
In the close room the noise was tremendous. It bounced off walls and its vibrations sprang dust from rafters and countertops. It unleashed energy from everywhere, as citizens dove for cover, raiders dropped and pivoted, aiming their weapons off the cue from Earl, and even D. A. got his gun out fast and into play. Only Frenchy stood rooted in place, for Earl's bullet had passed within a foot or so of him before it plowed into the center chest of what appeared to be a vacant, doughy-faced young man in an ill-fitting Sunday-go-to-meeting suit.
His eyes locked on Earl's as the shotgun fell from his hand, and implored him for mercy. The request was too late, for it wouldn't have mattered if Earl fired again or not. The young man went down like a sack of spring apples falling off a wagon, hitting the floor with the crack of bones and teeth breaking; his blood began to pump from his heart across the floor in a spreading satin puddle.
Everybody was yelling and diving and moving at once, but Earl knew it was over. He'd seen the front sight on the chest at the moment he'd fired.
'Goddamn, Mr. Earl,' somebody said.
'That damn boy!' said McGaffery. 'He didn't have the sense of a mule. You didn't have to kill him, though.'
'Maybe he ain't dead,' said a raider.
'He's dead,' said D. A., holstering his automatic. 'When Earl shoots, he don't miss. Good shot, Earl. You boys see that? That's how it's done.'
Earl himself felt nothing. He'd killed so many times before, and not only yellow men. He'd killed white men in Nicaragua in 1933, with the same kind of gun that Frenchy carried.
But he felt it in his heart right away, the difference: that was war. This was?well, what was it?
'You killed a Grumley,' said the bartender, still holding his bruised wrist. 'Now you got the Grumleys on you. Them boys don't forget a thing. Not never. The Grumleys will mark you and dog you the rest of your days, mister.'
'I been dogged before, mister' was all Earl said; then he turned to the raiders and said, 'Okay, let's get going. You got some busting up to do. Come on.'
But he didn't like the killing either. It wasn't a good sign, Grumleys or no Grumleys.
Chapter 15
Owney knew the most important thing about his situation was to pretend he had no situation.
Thus, though Hot Springs' insular, gossipy little business, gambling and criminal communities were literally aflame with speculation about the raid, and the Little Rock Courier-Herald and the Democrat had run pieces, it was important for him to suggest that nothing was really amiss. He got up, dressed dapperly?an ascot!?and went for a stroll down Central, saying hello in his best Ronald Colman voice to all those he knew, and he knew many people. He was especially British today, even wearing a Norfolk jacket and flannels, with a dapper tweed hat.
'Cheerio,' he said wherever he went. 'Be good sports. Keep the old upper lip stiff. Tut tut and ho ho, as we say in Jolly Olde.'
He attended a luncheon for the hospital board and dropped in at the Democratic Ladies' Club, where he made a donation of $1,000 toward the clubhouse redecorating project slated for that fall. He met Raymond Clinton, the Buick agency owner, and had a long discussion about the new Buicks. They were beauts! He said he was
