at odd moments in this process they'd strike poses so bored and languid and unselfconscious, it was as if he were observing them in the shower.
'Shoot, fer Chrissakes!' barked Owney, as the pressure of the stalk proved too heavy for his more brutal and direct style of gangstering.
'Now, now, boyo,' crooned Johnny, 'just another bloody second. I think I've got the leader all picked out.'
It was the bigger fellow in the middle, a drooping, long-armed hulk of a man, who led the boys onward, a little ahead of them. That would be Earl, of course. He was so large. Odd that he'd be so large; the kid had never said he was a large man, but just a fast, tough one, sinewy and quick and raw.
He found his position, and the leader stepped into the crosshairs.
Now, he thought.
They walked slowly through the dark, seeing the train ahead of them in the dark, its flanks illuminated so slightly by the vagrant incandescence of Central Avenue far away, but filling the horizon with light.
There was no movement from the train. Whatever was transpiring was transpiring in silence. These guys were good: very professional, D. A. was thinking.
He glanced to either side, and could see the boys nearest to him and beyond that make out the shape of the boys further away. He was aiming to rally in the hitch of the armored car to the car behind it, then send two men down to the other end, and in that way set up a cross fire. He'd have one or two boys actually under the car too, in case Johnny's men tried to duck out that way. Those boys could nail them easily. He was quite willing to kill all of Johnny's boys. He knew in this business that you had to commit to killing early and stay committed. If you poisoned your mind with notions of mercy, it would cost you a moment's hesitation and that could destroy you in a flash. When the guns came into play, shoot fast, shoot well, shoot a lot: those were the rules.
They were so close now.
The line disappeared or at least got so indistinct Earl could not pick it out against the slight illumination of the train a hundred yards off. There was a sense of blur, of disturbance to the atmosphere, but that only.
'They're going to be okay, I think,' said the boy.
'They're almost there. It's looking?'
Five short bursts fired so fast it sounded unreal. In the clear part of his brain, Earl made the numb note that somebody had extremely good trigger control and that the weapon's signature had an aching familiarity to it, something he knew so very well, and a fraction of a second later he identified it as an American carbine. But that part of his mind was very far away from the other part of his mind, which was hot and shocked and full of anger and fear and terror at once.
Ambush.
Perfecdy sprung, perfecdy set up, brilliantly planned.
Again the carbine: short, precise bursts, obviously an M2.
'Jesus, Earl,' the boy said, and made a move to run to the aid of his friends. But Earl's first move was to grab the boy and haul him to earth.
'Stay,' he hissed, for even though he had yet to articulate it in any meaningful fashion, a number of anomalies struck him at once. Why was the fire so precise? At night it was almost always a question of area fire, sweeping and intense; or it involved a star shell, throwing its illumination across the terrain, so that targets could be marked. Neither of these night-action features presented themselves and though, like the boy, he had a longing to run to the wounded, he knew too that to do so was simply to enter the killing zone as defenseless as they.
And now he cursed the lack of a long gun. What he needed, he saw in a flash, was the BAR now locked in the State Police arsenal in Little Rock. With that powerful instrument he could suppress the battlefield, drive the shooters to cover, get his people a chance to get back.
'We need to?'
'No,' Earl exploded, 'you follow on me.'
And with that Earl ran not to the killing zone, but rather to the switching shed, and set up a good supported kneeling position behind it, with just his head and shoulders and the pistol in a good two-handed position.
His ears found the zone and in a second a flash located the position. He could barely see his front sight, but he cranked up a good ten feet from the source of the fire, for he had to throw rounds in long arcs to get them there.
But it was a guessing game. He didn't know where you held to bring a.45 slug onto target from an unknown distance of about a hundred or so yards.
He fired, seven times quickly, put the gun down, and took Carlo's, who, smart as usual, had immediately understood the gist of it, and had prepared his own weapon for Earl, who then, with it, proceeded to lay out another magazine, exactly as Carlo inserted another magazine into the empty gun.
It wasn't much, but from far off came the splatter of shots hitting and kicking up dust and metal fragments, and maybe in that noise a kind of a sound of scurry or discomfort.
Earl had it now, and knew what would come next. He withdrew, knowing that he had but seconds. The boy was baffled.
'What are you?'
Again the carbine snapped out a short burst, and the astonishment came in where the bullets struck. Not near them, but exactly where they had fired from. Three bullets bit into the wood of the switching shed in exactly the location of Earl's foray, and three more spat across the dirt, kicking up clouds and filling the air with gun spray.
'Jesus!' said the boy.
'He can seeT croaked Earl. He thought for a second, realized he was zeroed in some sense. But he also figured the gunman would guess he'd move to the other side of the switching house. He didn't. He moved back to exactly where he'd been, took a sight picture, fired to the same point, and withdrew. A burst answered him, and he thought that was the last time that would work.
But next they heard a terrible groaning sound, and two figures spilled into the hollow just behind them. It was D. A., blood on his face, supported pitifully by the husky Slim.
'They done kilt us!' said Slim, and at that moment he made the mistake of rising too high out of the hollow as he addressed Earl, for three bullets popped dust, blood and hair off his head and he pitched forward.
Johnny watched them come, wondered briefly if he should try and hit the leader first but then decided they would scatter at the first shot and that he'd get more of them by going from right to left, He watched the man furthest from him come, settled into his rhythm, tracked him.
It was dead quiet.
He squeezed the trigger and a three-round burst pierced the night. The muzzle spewed burning gas brilliantly but on the scope the flashes registered only as interference across the bottom; he pivoted slightly and in less than half a second fired another squirt, then another, and then another.
It was not like killing.
It seemed to have nothing to do with killing. It was like some kind of ghastly fun, a game, to put the reticle of the sight on forms that had been reduced only to the green light of their heat, squirt them, feel the gende shudder of the weapon and watch as they seemed to collapse into themselves.
By the time he got to the leader, that fellow had figured out what was going on. It couldn't have been but a second or two. He fired, and the bullets were off mark, one out of three hitting, he knew, by the way the man fell. He was about to squirt him again when another man came into the scope; he diverted and fired again. A hero. Running to his fallen boss! Johnny liked that loyalty in a man, any man, even this man, as he killed him.
Now it was mopping up.
The living had fallen to the ground, presumably confused over the weird accuracy of their antagonist, but still believing themselves to be safe in the dark. They didn't know they were flanked on two sides, or that two more gunners from the train would be moving on them, with instructions to circle around behind, trapping them completely in the hollow behind the switching shed, toward which their own instincts would dictate that they retreat.
He hunted and found a crawler in the dark.
The three-bullet burst centered the boy perfecdy, kicking a spray of dust from his coat as the bullets skewered him. Another was intelligently moving not to the rear but to the extreme right, having figured that
