Suddenly the door blew open and a Negro gal sprawled out, thrown out by two Grumleys to draw fire. But she didn't, for the raiders stayed unexcited and reasonable, and in fact after falling to her knees, she got up and ran down the hallway, screaming 'Don't shoot me, oh please, sirs, don't shoot me.'
Earl fired another magazine, and it was enough.
They all broke from the room, Grumleys in rage and fleeing prostitutes in panic, figures in the foggy dust only readable by body postures.
In the fog, only gun flashes leapt out. Carlo fired at what had to be a man and brought him down as two or three of the gals ran clear. Above him, Slim found a target and fired, and his man fell backward, his finger jacking the trigger of a Thompson, which whittled a nasty gash in the ceiling. Two more black girls fled by, and a last Grumley came out of the room with a shotgun and three raiders shot him simultaneously and he fell down atop still a third.
Dust heaved. From somewhere women howled. Gunsmoke filled the air.
Earl clicked in a new magazine and slid to the side of the last door, then stepped in.
A last Grumley huddled in the corner, behind the large yellow mass of a woman in a dressing gown who screamed and blubbered but could not escape his iron grip. He had a big revolver jammed into her throat.
'I'll kill this sow!' he screamed. 'Throw down your guns or by God I'll kill this?'
But as he spoke, Earl flicked the BAR selector switch to semi-auto, brought the rifle to his shoulder like a marksman and shot him where what little of his head could be seen, just above the left ear, not a killing shot, but the rifle bullet had such velocity it spun him around to the wall. The big woman pulled away and fell to the floor and began to crawl, and before the Grumley could get his gun back into play, Slim and Carlo hammered him several times.
It was finally quiet at Mary Jane's.
'Jesus Christ,' said Slim.
'Man,' said Carlo. 'I never saw nothing like that.'
'Everybody okay?' asked Earl.
'Mr. Earl, you're bleeding.'
'I picked up some pellet somewhere in there. It ain't a goddamn thing. The boys all right? Frenchy, you okay?'
'Yes sir,' Frenchy said heavily.
They quickly checked to discover no casualties.
They moved back into the hallway and looked at what they had wrought. Dead Grumleys lay along the hallway, which itself was a corridor of ruin, as so many shots had torn through wood and plasterboard, and the air remained heavy with gunsmoke and floating dust and grit. Empty cartridges in the hundreds littered the floor. The blood had pooled here and there.
'There, boys,' Earl said, 'y'all take a good look. That is the world you have entered. Now I want you to form a detail and pick up all the weapons. If them Hot Springs detectives get ahold of the Thompsons, they'll just go back to the bad boys and we'll have to take 'em all over again. If that goddamn machine gun is too heavy to carry, Slim, you find someone who knows about such things and strip the toggle bolt. If nothing else, I want that bolt sunk deep in Lake Catherine, so we don't have to worry about it no more. If you can't find no one, you come to me.'
'What if the cops?'
'The cops ain't gonna stand agin you tonight. Nobody's going to stand agin you tonight.'
As the men spread out to retrieve the fallen guns, another raider came down the hall to Earl.
'Mr. Parker's downstairs, Earl. He wants to see you.'
'Yeah, yeah,' said Earl. 'I'll get there in a moment. I don't hear no ambulances. It's clear now. Tell 'em to get some ambulances in here in case any of these gals are shot up. I think we saved most of 'em.'
They could hear a woman wailing loudly downstairs.
'Mr. Earl, you should know: there's a problem.'
'What would that be, son?'
'Some women got shot.'
'We lost one, by my count. Them Grumley boys shot her.'
'No sir. Not here. Down the block at the Pythian Hotel. Two Negro gals sitting in the parlor. Somehow a burst came through the window and kilt 'em both. The Negro peoples are down there all het up, and the cops may have a riot. Mr. Becker is goddamned upset and there's all these reporters here.'
Chapter 24
The facts were tragic. Mrs. Alva Thomas, forty-seven, of New Albany, Georgia, and Miss Lavern Sevier Carmichael, twenty-three, of New Iberia, Louisiana, had been sitting in the lobby of the Pythian Hotel and Baths when the gunfire down the street had erupted. While most sensible people got down on their stomachs at the sound, the two ladies, in deep religious concentration, declined to do so. God's attention was elsewhere. Each was hit but once. The.30-caliber-model-of-1906 bullets had flown a long way and not lost but a mite of their power when they struck the two women fatally.
The Reverend Tyrone Blandings, of the leading Negro church in Hot Springs, requested a meeting with Mr. Becker. There he was formally apologized to, and told the county would pay for the shipping and funeral expenses of the two bodies, but that the enforcement of the law must be absolute and sometimes in these confrontations between the sinners and the sinless, unaccountable accidents happened. It was God's will. He must have a plan.
Meanwhile, Mayor O'Donovan empaneled a group of elder Hot Springs citizens to investigate the out-of- control Jayhawkers who turned the city into a war zone. If it had been within the purview of his powers, he informed the newspapers, he would have called a grand jury and issued indictments, but unfortunately it was only the prosecuting attorney who had the legal power to convene such an assembly.
The outstanding warrants on seven of the nine Murfreesboro Grumleys were never acknowledged in the Hot Springs newspapers, though the bigger little Rock papers made certain this evidence reached the public up front.
The dead were listed, all of them Grumleys or Grumley cousins: Nathan Grumley, forty-two; Wayne Grumley, Jr. twenty-one; Jasper 'Jape' Grumley, twenty-three; Bowman Peck, twenty-seven; Alvin Grumley, twenty-eight; Jeter Dodge, thirty-two; Duane Grumley, thirty-two; Buddy 'Junior' Mims, thirty-three; Dewey Grumley, thirty- seven; Felton Parr, thirty-nine; and one unidentified body, burned beyond all recognition, presumably that of R. K. Pindell, age unknown, gone missing. Of the eleven, Nathan was clearly the most violent, as he had spent twelve years in the penitentiary on a case of second-degree murder and was suspected of a variety of other crimes, including rape, child molestation and dozens of counts of armed robbery as well as being widely suspected of killing a clown. He was also a known contract killer for Jefferson Davis Grumley, known as the 'Boss of Pike County,' and brother to Elmer 'Pap' Grumley, once known as the 'Boss of Garland County,' though now thought to be retired.
But each of the other Grumleys or Grumley cousins had at least one and some as many as five outstanding warrants lodged against their names, for crimes that went anywhere from breaking and entering to suspicion of murder. So those Murfreesboro Grumleys, most people acknowledged, were not innocents.
The next evening, Mr. Becker gave a speech before the Better Business Bureau of Hot Springs in the Banquet Room of the Arlington Hotel. Giving speeches was a gift of his, as he had that rare ability to project concern and empathy and at the same time heroic will. He bit his lip when he discussed his dilemma in sending his men in against so dangerous a foe as gamblers and wanted men armed with machine guns, but then in the end decided it was worth it, for the law had to be served no matter the cost. The law was what separates us from the apes, after all. And unlike some men, he felt the weight of the deaths of Negroes as heavily as he felt the deaths of white folks; he was sorry that such a thing had occurred, but he assured his listeners it was unavoidable, as part of his commitment to reform. The gambling and corruption that had marked Hot Springs for a century had to be stopped and he would stop it, no matter what it cost him. Most of the men in the room believed that he himself had led the raid, as he frequently referred to 'his boys' and the risks they had taken for Hot Springs and for America. He knew
