Silver Jack was now said to be at the bottom of Lake Michigan with one end of a rope around his neck and the other tied to a hundred-pound bag of bricks.
“What’s that got to do with young Lowe here?” John Ashley said.
“I paid a visit to the sumbitch responsible for that sack a bricks,” Kid Lowe said. “I mean, hell, it made me look bad, them snatching him out of the restaurant like they did while I was taking a piss. Made me look like a didnt know how to do my job.”
John Ashley nodded and studied the Kid more closely. “That sumbitch in the lake now too?”
“Ask me no questions,” Kid Lowe said, “I’ll tell you no lies.”
John Ashley laughed and said that was fine by him.
Gordon Blue was sure the matter would be cleared up in a week or two, but until then Kid Lowe needed a safe place to lie low. The Ashley boys grinned at the little fugitive and said any friend of Gordon’s was a friend of theirs and they’d be happy to put the boy up for a time, so long as he kept to himself all complaints about mosquitoes or the lack of city amenities he might be used to—such as running water or electricity. Kid Lowe smiled shyly and thanked them and said he’d be proud to get back to country living after three years of the big city life, which he had lately come to lose all fondness for.
They returned to the hotel to meet with Ed and Frank Ashley and then at Gordon Blue’s suggestion they all packed into a taxi and headed for the city limits and Hardieville. One side of Frank Ashley’s face was yet puffed and patched with purple from its impact with the windshield when he ran the Dusenberg squarely into an oak. A drizzling rain had fallen through most of the early evening and the limestone streets shone pale under the rattling taxi’s headlamps and in the cast of the infrequent streetlights. A cat’s-eye amber moon rose out of the Atlantic. The air had cooled and the wind was to seaward and carried on it the scent of wet earth and ripe foliage and was free of the usual stink of dredged bay bottom.
At this late hour of a Friday night the Hardieville sidewalks were raucous with revelers and with drunks doing the hurricane walk. From its brightly blazing doors and windows came the smells of whiskey and cooking grease, sweat and perfume, the sounds of laughter and shouting and badly sung songs, the plinking of ragtime pianos and the blatting of brass bands. They went into the Purple Duck, a supperplace offering three musical floorshows per evening, one of which was in progress before a sparse crowd as they made their way past the dining room—a trio of boaters and peppermint jackets softstepping on a tiny stage and singing “On Moonlight Bay.” A woman in a green satin dress came forth to greet Gordon Blue with a kiss that left its cheerful lipsticked imprint on his cheek. Her smile was warm but her eyes quick and assessing and John Ashley figured her for nobody’s fool. Gordon Blue introduced her as Miss Catherine, the proprietress, and she smiled around at them all and bade them have a swell time.
Gordon Blue led the way through a curtained doorway in the rear of the room and down a narrow hall to yet another door. He grinned at his friends and delivered three sharp raps and then two lesser ones. A small peephole opened in the door for a moment and then closed and there was the sound of a latch working and the door opened and a short broad man in a red bowtie and black vest nodded at Gordon Blue and permitted them to pass into a room hazy with dim yellow light and cigarette smoke and loud with ragtime music and laughter and talk. There were crowded tables all about and a small dance floor at one end of the room and beside it a bandstand and on it a Negro pianist playing his rag tunes in a sweat. A brass-railed bar ran the length of the room and the backbar was resplendent with a tiered array of every variety of bottled spirits. Whores everywhere—in shimmies and in filmy Arabian pantalettes and vests and in white cotton bloomers and beribboned lace bodices cut low on their milky breasts—whores plying the tables and bantering with the patrons at the bar and here and there twining arms with a grinning man and the pair making for the stairway leading to the rooms above.
They wended their way to the bar and each man called for bourbon. As the bartender set them up John Ashley scanned the crowd and marveled happily at the great allure of vice. He turned to Gordon Blue and said, “I’ve heard tell it aint no fruit so sweet as that which is forbidden, and ever time I come in a place like this I do believe I heard tell correctly.”
Gordon Blue grinned and said, “Spoken like a true philosopher, Johnny.”
John Ashley smiled. “I do hope and pray the damn Saloon League gets the federals to outlaw spirits. Hellfire, Gordy, we’ll all be rich in no time.”
Gordon Blue raised his glass high and said, “To the Saloon League! May its high moral principles enrich us all!”
Four hours later they’d each of them made a trip upstairs with a girl and Frank and Ed told their brothers they would see them back at the hotel and then departed for The Pair-’O-Dice down the street to see what it was like. John and Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue then posted themselves at the bar of The Purple Duck’s backroom and were shortly joined by Miss Catherine who clearly had a special fondness for Gordon Blue. Each man bought a round in his turn and they talked and told jokes and finally agreed to call it a night.
The crowd had grown larger now and the air was thick and warm with body heat and gauzed with cigarette smoke and the front door seemed very far away at the other end of the room. Gordon Blue asked Miss Catherine if they might use her special side door and she led them to her office and shut the door behind them and pulled back a heavy set of curtains against the wall to reveal her private door. It opened into a dark alley thick with mud on which a walkway of planks had been laid end to end from Miss Catherine’s door to the street some forty yards distant to their right. Immediately to their left was a cul-de-sac. A light drizzle yet fell in a mist and the alley reeked of rot and human waste and the only light in the alleyway was the dim glow from the streetlamps.
While Gordon Blue said his private goodnights to Miss Catherine, John Ashley stepped out onto the plank walkway and the others followed behind. Now Gordon Blue came out and Miss Catherine waved from the brightly lighted doorway and said, “You boys take care now, you hear?” and closed the door behind them.
They began to file along the boards, one behind the other, just as a trio of men in derbies came round the corner at the far end of the alley and started toward them on the planks, stark black silhouettes against the yellow backlight of the street, their shadows stretching before them like shades loosed of the graveyard.
“This might could get interestin,” Bob Ashley said.
Near the midpoint of the walkway, John Ashley and the other point man halted with three feet between them and regarded each other. John Ashley felt himself clearly illumined in the glow of the streetlights, but the other man remained indistinct, a backlighted silhouette. One of the other men raised a bottle to his mouth and it gleamed brightly against the light and John Ashley caught the redolence of rum.
“Well now, I guess you lads will be getting a bit of mud on your shoes now, wont ye?” the front man said, and John Ashley felt rather than saw the man’s grin.
“We was on this walk before you boys,” John Ashley said. “Anybody gone get their shoes muddy it’s you.”
“You were on these boards
“What the hell you doin
Logan shook off the man’s grip and turned to John Ashley and brought a snapblade knife out of his pocket so fast and smoothly it was as if the weapon had been in his hand all along. The small
“Fucken hillbillies,” Logan said and took a step toward John Ashley just as Kid Lowe came slogging up alongside the planks and delivered a grunting kick to the knifer’s balls that raised the man to his toes. John Ashley heard the hiss of Logan’s sharp suck of air and even as the man started to sag Bob Ashley stepped forward and struck him with a huge roundhouse that sent him sprawling back into the mud and Kid Lowe set to kicking the man in the head.
The point man caught John Ashley by the throat with both hands and they staggered off the planks and into the mud and John Ashley could not breathe. He grabbed the man’s arms tight at the elbows and planted his feet and swung him around hard into the wall and the man’s breath blew out of him. John Ashley broke free and grabbed him by the neck with one hand and by the hair with the other and rammed the back of the man’s head into the wall a hard half-dozen times and then let him fall to a sitting position and drove his knee into his face and felt the man’s front teeth give way as the man’s head snapped back to strike the wall yet again with a hollow thunk. The man fell
