the St. Louis & Iron Mountain line was shut down until the fire could be put out and the bridge reinforced. All freights were to be diverted over to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific lines, which went east and west; a few would be shifted to the Hot Springs rail-yard.
'That's it,' said D. A., getting the news from a messenger sent out by Fred Becker. 'We go, then. It's all set. I'd get myself ready now. Becker says that northbound train won't be in until well after midnight, but I want us on site and ready to move well before then.'
The men nodded and mumbled; most were glad to be moving out and into the last phase, since the chicken farm, such a joke in the abstract, proved to be a hot, dirty, dusty old place that smelled of hardened chickenshit anyhow, and they were anxious to move onward. Even Carlo Henderson, who'd just showed up that afternoon and hadn't had time to settle in yet, appeared ready to go and didn't need any rest from his journey back.
The teams drove in by different routes, and assembled just west of the railyard and station, on Prospect, behind a grocery store. There was less a need for secrecy this time, because, absent the Thompson submachine guns and the BARs, they were just men in suits with hats, completely nondescript in a town filled with men dressed exactly alike.
Earl checked his Hamilton, saw that it was nearly midnight. They were about a half mile south of fabulous Central, where the clubs and casinos were blazing up the night, so over here it wasn't nearly so busy.
'All right,' Earl said. 'I want you going out in skirmish teams, two men apiece. Don't go in a mob. Couple teams move on down the block. Don't get caught in the light of the station. Spend a few minutes in the dark and get your night eyes. Go into the yard and about halfway across it there's a little hollow and some open space, under the electric power wires. There's a switching house there, just a little shed, and set there somewhere. That's where we'll rally. We'll hunker up there and wait till the train arrives.'
'Earl, suppose they gun the guards?'
'I know if we attack 'em while they've got the guns on the guards they will kill those boys. If we attack 'em before, we got no case and we stop the robbery, but we want a case. So we have to trust they go in and get out fast, and that's when we go. All set?'
They all mumbled assent.
'Anything to say, Mr. Parker?'
D. A., who usually wasn't with them at this point, said only, 'You boys listen to Mr. Earl. He's right on this one. I'll be with you the whole way.'
'Sure wish I had my tommy gun,' Slim said.
'Hell, you couldn't hit nothing with it nohow,' someone else said, to some laughter.
'Okay, fellas. Good hunting and be careful. Don't get yourself hurt. Everybody goes home.'
They broke down by teams and one by one the teams departed, until only Earl and D. A. were left.
'Well, Earl, you all set?'
'Yes sir.'
'Earl, this will work fine. I swear to you.'
'I trust you, Mr. Parker.'
'Now, Earl, trust me on one last thing.'
'Yes sir?'
'When we get to that switching house, and when we get an indicator that there's a robbery going on, I will move out with the boys. I want you and Carlo to stay in the switching house.'
'What?'
'You heard what I said.'
'What the hell is?'
'Now you listen, Earl. This is going to happen one of two ways. It's going to happen easy or hard. If it happens easy, it's just going to be a matter of 'Stick 'em up, you bastards.' Now if it goes hard, it could be a sticky mess. Then I want you coming in where you can help out the most. You're the only one here with that kind of savvy. And that Henderson kid, he's a rock-solid hand too. So that's what I want you two boys doing.'
'Mr. Parker, the boys are used to seeing me up front.'
'The boys will be fine, Earl. You have trained the boys well.'
'You're just trying to?'
'Earl, this is the way I have figured it out. This is the way I want to do it.'
But Earl was worried. He knew the fight would be what it wanted to be, not what D. A. wanted it to be.
Now Frenchy had no place to go. It's the waiting that got to him. Best thing would be to find a whorehouse, get drunk and laid, and wake up tomorrow morning to see how it had gone.
But that wouldn't work. Tomorrow, early, he'd take the bus to Little Rock and from there a plane on to Washington, D. C. The day after, he would go to a well-appointed law firm on K Street where a senior partner named David Wilson Llewelyn would interview him, stricdy as a formality. David Llewelyn had served in the OSS during the war and was a close personal friend of a man named Allen Dulles, who had run OSS. He was also a close personal friend of a man called Charles Luciano, recently deported, but a gangster who had made certain the docks ran well in New York during the war. Llewelyn owed Charlie Lucky a favor, particularly when Llewelyn couldn't get the deportation canceled. And Charlie Lucky owed Owney Maddox a favor, for some obscure service years back. Frenchy would be the favor, a prize in a transaction that would satisfy die honor of three important and powerful men, none of whom really gave a shit about Walter H. formerly 'Shorty' and now 'Frenchy' Short of Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
He felt utterly desolate. He sat in the bar of a place just down from the bus station, a honky-tonk full of smoke and mending GIs on outpatient status from the Army and Navy Hospital, amid girls of somewhat dubious morality and hygiene. He nursed a bourbon, and tried not to see himself in the mirror across the bar. But there he was: a handsome young man in a spattered mirror, very prep-looking, as if he'd just stepped off the Choate campus. Looked younger than his age. Who'd look at such a mild, innocent kid and guess what grew in there? Who knew he had such dark talents, such a twisty, deviant mind, such raw guts, and such a total commitment to himself above all things? You could look at a thousand such boys and never pick him as the one like that.
Frenchy was busy doing something his training would teach him was utterly poindess. He was justifying.
It's not my fault, he was saying to himself. They betrayed me. They did it to me first. They should have fought harder for me. Goddamn that Earl, goddamn him to hell: he knew how good I was and he knew it wasn't my fault I stumbled in the middle of a gunfight and after all I was the one who made everybody look good when I got those two bank robbers who I know were trying to move on me and would have killed me and maybe the whole raid team if I hadn't've stopped them.
His was the gift of self-conviction. In a little while he had reconstructed the past. This new version was much better. In it, he was the secret hero of the team. All the fellas looked up to him. He led all the raids. He got the two bank robbers. But Earl and D. A. were jealous of his success, of his natural heroic style and his oinning and nerve. After all, he had found the Central Book. So they had to defeat him, destroy him, ruin his chances. The old and the corrupt always tried to destroy the fresh, the energetic, the talented. It happened all the time. It wasn't his fault.
The more he thought about it, the better he felt.
'Anything?' whispered Owney.
He crouched next to Johnny on the flatcar, and crouched behind them, guarding the delicate umbilical between the carbine and the light source, was Ding-Dong.
'I think they're there. I heard something. But I can't see anything yet,' Johnny responded.
The only sound was the odd tinkle of running water, as if someone somewhere had left a faucet running. The smell of kerosene, oil and coal filled the air, making it unpleasant to breathe. Odd noises came: the scuttling of rats or possibly hoboes, the movement of yard bulls on their rounds, the clanks as brakemen greased up the journal boxes over the axles. But here, in the center of the yard, it was surprisingly clear: the coaling and watering docks were farther out, on the outskirts.
Johnny Spanish watched through the green glow of the infrared scope. It was strange. The world had been turned inside out, almost like a photographic negative. light was dark and dark was light, with a crosshair
