those rare nights of pure bliss.
Then a shadow fell across the table. He looked up to see the long, sad face of D. A. Parker.
'Mr. Becker?'
'Yes?'
'I think you'd best come with me. The boys are working tonight and you're going to be needed down there.'
'What? You said?'
'You remember I asked you to make that call yesterday concerning a place on Malvern Avenue. We used that to set up an opportunity that looked very promising,' said D. A., hoping to cut off the tirade that accompanied Becker's instruction in any raid plans that masked the prosecuting attorney's deep ambivalence about the use of force and his own physical fear, which was immense.
Fred rose.
'Folks,' he said, 'honey,' acknowledging his wife, 'I've got to run. There's work to be done and?'
At that moment came the sound of gunfire. Machine-gun fire. It rattled through the night, a liquefied rip familiar to each man who'd served in a war zone. It could be no other sound. If you've heard it once you know it forever.
Fred's face went bloodless.
'Sounds like the boys are doing fine,' said D. A.
Chapter 23
What is wrong?
He didn't know. But some weird vibration of distress hummed in his ear. Something somehow was wrong.
Two cars, lights dimmed, pulled down the alley, passing him, coming to rest at the rear of Mary Jane's. Silently, the doors sprang open, and eight members of the rear-entry team got out, cumbersome in their vests with their awkward weapons. Without noise they assembled into a stick as Slim led them to the door, a shotgun out before him and aimed at the knob. Except for a scuffle of feet and the breathing of the men, muted but still insistent, it was quiet.
What is wrong?
Then he knew.
They would know we'd also come in the rear because that's our signature. We go in multiple entrances simultaneously. We swarm in: that's D. A.'s best trick. Therefore, knowing that, they will have to ambush us from the rear.
But how?
There's no room to fire from the building at men this close and there's no sign of men moving in on them. The alley had been entirely deserted this whole time: only Japanese Marines could hide so silently.
Then Earl knew where they'd be.
They'd be down the block. He recalled a truck parked there, on a cross street, a good two hundred feet ahead, and he instantly diverted his gaze down the alley, trying to see through the dark.
Suddenly from the front, the sound of guns firing angrily, long bursts chewing the night apart, bullets blowing into wood and glass.
Then Earl saw movement in the dark. He couldn't make it out clearly: just a sense of movement as one darker shade of blackness moved twenty-five feet and planted itself directly across the alley exit to a cross street half a block down.
He waited, forcing his concentration against the subdy differing shades of blackness.
He thought he saw something squirm and believed it to be a tarpaulin being pulled back to reveal men hunched over the lip of the truck bed, as if settling in to aim.
Earl fired: the BAR chopped through its first magazine in less than two seconds, and far off he saw over the jarring sights the flashes and puffs as his bullets jacked into something metallic, possibly a truck, lifting dust and sparks from it. He slapped a new magazine in fast, and fired another long burst into it, holding the rounds into it, watching them strike and skip off. A shot, then a second, came from the truck bed, and then somehow a gas tank went, lighting up the night in a roiling orange spume and in its concussive force lifting the truck ever so slightly and setting it down. A man in flames with a Thompson gun ran from it, dropped the gun and fell to the alleyway.
Earl looked back to Mary Jane's to see the last of the rear-entry team race into the place.
The car pulled up out front.
They were so tense their breaths came in dry spurts, like rasps scraping over a washbucket.
'Okay,' said Stretch, just barely in command, 'you know the drill. Let's go. Peanut, you're on the big gun.'
'Gotcha,' said Peanut, sliding down behind the fender of the car, raising his Thompson as he fingered off the safety, and checked with the same finger to make certain the fire selector was ratcheted toward full auto. His front sight bobbed and weaved but then stabilized and came to rest on the man slouching at the table in the barroom.
The three remaining men, their loads in their hands, charged up the walk to the storefront. It wasn't far, maybe twenty-five feet. They kicked open the door and screamed 'Raid! Raid! Get your hands up!
Jape saw the door open, goddamn! and was so excited he thought he'd piss up his pants. He kicked the table away to brace the Thompson against his hip, feeling his hand curve over the huge hundred-round drum to grab the fore grip and hold it tight.
'Raid! RaidJ' came the shouts, and as he raised the weapon he had the consciousness of glass or something breaking and it was as if he were being mauled by a lion who leaped at him from nowhere, and from that sensation there came the sensation of drowning, sinking, falling, all of it toward fatigue and ultimately sleep in darkness.
The three at the door were not aware that behind them Peanut had fired, bringing down the barroom gunman with one perfecdy placed burst. They were themselves unarmed, except for handguns still holstered. What they carried, two apiece, were buckets half filled with screws, stones, pieces of broken glass and scrap wood, and quickly, each lobbed his burden, one then the other, into the bar to the stairway, where the buckets hit, and emptied their contents in a rattle of things scraping and clanking and falling and crashing. It was no substitute for the sound of human feet in a normal world, but in the superheated one of house combat?gunshots now came from behind too, for some odd reason?it was enough to confuse the gunner upstairs, who now fired.
Nathan, the prison-hardened Murfreesboro Grumley behind the weapon, simply kept the butterfly trigger depressed. The gun, mounted on a securely heavy sled tripod, fired for about two minutes, and it poured down such a hail of 8-mm fire that the floor which absorbed it shattered, while broken flooring nails flipped through the air, amid the clouds of other debris that flew. The gun was so terrifying that D. A.'s plan simply fell apart.
The front-entry team retreated hastily to its car and took up cowering positions. The rear-entry team, all eight men including Frenchy and Carlo, collected in a choke point just out of the beaten zone, unable to think, talk, signal or otherwise function intelligently in the rawness and the hugeness of the sound. Courage was beyond the question; it was meaningless in the face of such a volume of fire, and the men looked at each other bug-eyed and confused. They needed a leader and he didn't get there for another thirty seconds, though without his vest and with a BAR.
'Get back1' Earl screamed, for he knew that the gunner would soon see he was firing at nothing and would swing fire.
They scuttled backward, and in the next second, the gunner de-ratcheted his gun from the sled tripod, swung it radically to the right and sent another eight hundred rounds through the wall into the hallway where until that second the men had been.
The gunfire atomized the thin plaster and wood wall that separated the stairwell from the hallway. Dust and chips flew; the air filled with poisonous brew.
Earl waited now until he heard a clink.
That meant a belt had rim out and he heard crankings and clankings as Nathan attempted to speed-change
