A World of Thieves

what they carried with them.

I put the gearshift into neutral and got out of the car.

She slid across the seat and grabbed my coatsleeve as I shut the door. “Sonny, no!”

“Meet you at the house tomorrow,” I said. “Go on.”

“Sonny, please—you’ll burn up!” Her grip twisted in my sleeve.

“Go on, I said!”

“He’s probably dead. He’ll kill you if he’s not. He’s crazy.”

I pulled free of her and backed away from the car. I half expected her to refuse to go, was already telling myself I didn’t have time to argue about it. Her face at the window was golden.

Men came racing past us, yelling, cursing, wearing lunatic looks of panic, of jubilation. The first of the getaway cars swung around the Chrysler with engines racing and klaxons blaring. Another minute and the junction road would be jammed.

Maybe she was crying, maybe it was only the rain. I couldn’t hear what she said for the surrounding pandemonium, but her lips were easy to read.

I love you too, Sonny.

And she drove off in the firelit rain.

I ran down the muddy street, dodging vehicles, shouldering through the throng rushing in the other direction. Men clambering into the beds of passing trucks, hopping onto running boards and bumpers, the stronger shoving aside the weaker. The advancing flow of fire had arrived at the far end of the street and several buildings were already in flame. And still the rain fell and lightning blazed and thunder kept crashing.

There was a tangle of cars in front of the Wildcat, some with a star on their doors. A transport truck with a star too. Men in big hats and gunbelts. Rangers. The rumored raid come true. The lawmen hustling now to rescue those they’d come to arrest. A crush of people at the Wildcat’s front door.

I ran down the alley to the rear of the building and went in by the back way, thinking to get Max’s help in getting Russell downstairs.

He wasn’t at his post. The hallway was dark and hot, smelling of smoke. From the parlor side of the wall came frightened female cries and rough male voices shouting things I couldn’t make out.

The door to Mona’s office was open and I rushed to it, hoping Bubber was still there.

He was. On his back in the middle of the room. On a carpet of blood from his ripped throat. Max beside him, an ear to the floor, a small stained hole in the back of his jacket over the spot where his heart would be.

The room seemed suddenly to lack air.

Mona sat in a corner, knees up to her breasts, hand to her mouth, terrified eyes on Bubber. Then another shuddering crash of thunder and she put her face in her hands and wailed.

Whatever happened here, Russell was upstairs.

I bolted from the room and around to the stairway just as Nurse Rose came swooping down to the landing, face wrenched in terror—and she ran headlong into a beefy Ranger coming from the parlor.

“Whoa, Nellie!” he said, catching her by the shoulders, but she twisted from his grasp and fled around the corner.

As he turned toward me I drew the .380 and swung it backhand and caught him with the barrel just over the ear. His head slung sideways and his big hat tumbled from his redhaired head and he did a couple of shaky sidesteps and his knees buckled and he went down in a heap.

I took the steps two at a time to the landing and ran down the hall to the last door on the right. The heat much greater now, the smell of smoke stronger.

I yanked open the door and it banged against the wall—and all in an instant saw a man whirl around from looming over Russell, saw the cords standing on Russell’s neck and his mouth open wide in rasping screams almost inaudible in the din from outside, saw that the man’s hand at Russell’s bloody crotch was no hand at all but a bright metal contraption. Saw John Bones grinning fiercely…and the yellow spark of his pistol.

I caromed off the doorjamb and staggered breathless along the wall and heard another gunshot and the room tilted and the floor hit me in the face.

Pain boiling in my gut, wrenching at my knee. The .380 four feet away. Gustafson prone and glass-eyed at the foot of the bed.

Hard gruntings. John Bones arching backward, his neck clenched in Russell’s forearm, his gunhand in Russell’s grip, the pincers somehow wedged behind him.

Crawling to the .380, feeling my belly smearing. The air hazed pink, the floor steaming.

John Bones’ revolver thunks the floor at his booted feet.

Russell screaming—the pincers seized on his forearm, broken bones jutting.

John Bones wresting himself around, clamping the pincers to Russell’s throat. Blood jumps and Russell spasms and falls still.

The .380 in my hand. Cocking.

John Bones crouching, hand closing on his gun.

The .380 kicks and he flings back against the wall and sits hard, legs splaying, gun arm dropping limp under a bloody shoulder, pistol unhanded. His eyes bright on me, pincers on his lap, opening and closing.

Boots stomping hard to the door.

My pistol on John Bones’ great white grin.

Somebody shrieking, “Drop it or die!”

I shoot.

She finds the back door jimmied, every drawer emptied on the floor, every closet rummaged, every mattress upended. The place ransacked by someone practiced. The envelope gone from behind the toilet tank. The best hiding place for it, they’d said, but what some thieves know, so do others. She takes lunch in a local diner where all the talk is of Blackpatch. The fire reported to be still burning on this following noon. Sixty-three dead and counting. Not a building left standing. Gonna have to call it Blacker patch, some wiseguy snickers, and gets more hard looks than laughs. She waits three days before admitting to herself what she has known from the moment he got out of the car. Then fuels the Chrysler and heads east, in the direction of New Orleans. She has a total of two dollars and forty cents, which meager stake might have been worrisome but for her discovery of a fully loaded .44 under the car seat. It is all she will need, she knows, to make her way in this world.