Brown, though he gripped his chest as if he'd been hit by a truck there.
'Them flares blinded me,' he said to Johnny.
'There, there, lad,' said Johnny. 'They blinded me too.'
At last they reached a culvert, saw the water glittering through it.
'That's where the bastards went. Trust a rat to find a hole. Where does this go?'
'Under the streets,' said Owney. 'Goddamn. Goddamn, the cowboy got away.'
'But he's running scared, probably hurt. He's no problem, Owney. Not for a time. He'll mend, he'll come for you. We'll find him first and put him down. Damn, he's as sly a dog as they come, isn't he? How in Jesus' name did he know of this culvert?'
'I know what I'll do,' Owney said. 'I'll call the police.'
'Johnny, Johnny?'
'What is it?'
'He's still alive.'
'Who's still alive?'
'The old man.'
'Jesus Christ,' said Owney, turning.
He walked with Johnny quickly back to the shed. In the hollow behind it, the old man had fallen. He lay soaked in his own blood, jacking and twitching with the pain. Herman must have hit him five times, and Johnny two or three times before that. But the gristly old bastard wouldn't die.
'He's a tough boyo,' said Johnny.
The old man looked up at them, coughed up a red gob, then looked them over.
'So you're the fellows done this work? Well, let me tell you, Earl will track you down and give you hell on earth before you go to God's own hell.'
'You old turkey buzzard, why don't you hurry and die,' said Owney. 'We don't have all night for your yapping.'
'Owney, I marked you for scum the first time I laid eyes on you and I ain't never wrong about such things.'
'Yes, but how come then I'm the man with the gun, eh, old man? How come you're lying there shot to pieces, bleeding out by the quart?'
'Takes a lot to kill me,' the old man said. Then he actually smiled. 'And maybe you don't have enough pecker-heft to get it done.'
Owney leaned over him and shot him in the forehead with his Luger like a big hero.
Chapter 48
They ran crouching through the darkness and in a bit of time the slight illumination of the opening disappeared as the underground course of the stream turned this way or that.
'Jesus, I can't go on,' moaned Carlo.
Earl set him down, peeled back his coat and his shirt.
The carbine bullet had blown through him high in the back and come clean out the front. He bled profusely from each wound.
Earl tore the boy's shirt, and wadded a roll of material into each hole, the entrance and the exit, as the boy bucked in pain and tossed his head. With the boy's tie, he tied a loop tightly that bound the two crude bandages together. With his own tie, he quickly hung a loop around the boy's neck, to make a crude sling.
'Let's go.'
'God, Earl, I'm so damned tired. Can't you go and get help while I rest?'
'Sonny, they will see you when you can't see them and they will kill you. If you stay, you die. It's that simple.'
'I don't think I can.'
'I know you can. You ain't hit that bad. Someone has to survive to talk for them boys that didn't. Someone's got to remember them boys and what they did and how they was betrayed.'
'Will you pay them back, Earl? Will you get them?'
'Damned straight I will.'
'Earl, don't. D. A. didn't want you in trouble. D. A. loved you, Earl. You were his son. Don't you get that? If you go down, then what he did don't mean a thing.'
'Now you're talking crazy.'
'No, no,' said the boy. 'He sent me to investigate you 'cause he was worried you had a death wish. And then when I found out about your daddy, he told me to get back and not say nothing about it.'
'I don't know what you're talking about, but you're wasting your breath. My daddy's been dead a long time.'
'Your daddy just died a minute ago and his last wish was that you live and have a happy life, which you have earned.'
'You just shut that yap now, and come on.'
'Earl, I'm so tired.'
'Bobby Lee, you?'
'Pm not Bobby Lee, Earl. I'm Carlo Henderson. I ain't your little brother, I'm just a deputy.'
'Well, whoever you are, mister, you ain't staying here.'
With that Earl pulled him to his feet, and pushed him along through the hot, sloppy water in the darkest darkness either of them had ever seen.
Hot Springs Creek was a sewer and a drain. It smelled of shit and dirty bathwater and booze and blood. As they sloshed along, they heard the skitter of rats. There were snakes down here, and other ugly things that lived under whorehouses and fed on the dead. Maggots and spiders, broken glass, rotting timbers, all lighdess and dank, with the stench of bricks a century old and the banks a kind of muddy slop that could have been shit.
'How much further, Mr. Earl?'
'Not much. I don't hear 'em trailing.'
'I don't neither.'
'That goddamned infrared gizmo was probably too heavy to carry along down here, now that I think about it.'
'Earl, how'd you know of this place?'
'Shut up. Don't be talking too much. Another couple of hundred feet and we'll begin to think about getting out.'
'Getting out?'
'Yeah. You'll never make it if we go all the way to the other end. You'll bleed out. It's another mile and a half ahead. But all the speakeasies, the baths, all them places got secret exits, just in case. We'll get through one of them.'
'Earl, I am so tired. So goddamned tired.'
'Henderson, I don't b'lieve I ever heard you swear before.'
'If I get out of here I am going to swear, smoke a cigarette and have sexual intercourse with a lady.'
'Sounds like a pretty good program to me. I might join you, but I'd add a bottle of bourbon to the mix. And I don't drink no more.'
'Well, I ain't ever had no sexual intercourse.'
'You will, kid. You will. That I guarantee you.'
He pulled the boy out of the water and up the muddy bank, where he found a heavy wooden door. It seemed to be bolted shut. The boy sat sloppily in the mud, while Earl got out his jackknife and pried at a lock, and in a bit old tumblers groaned and he pulled the thing open two feet, before it stuck again.
He got the boy up, and the two of them staggered onward through a chamber, up into a cellar, around boxes and crates, and upstairs, and then came out into corridors. The temperature suddenly got very hot, and they
