“Those are their names, arent they?” She reached out to put her hand on his arm but he abruptly stood up and began packing. She watched him for a moment and then said softly, “I had the feeling he didnt really want to be here. Whatever it was he had against you…well, I dont think it matters to him anymore. I had the feeling he was going away. He wont come back here again, Robert, I know he wont.”
Bob Baker turned to glare at her. “Since when did you get to know so awful much about him?”
She looked at him a moment, her aspect unfathomable to him, and then got up and walked down the hall and into the bedroom and gently closed the door.
He went to the kitchen and poured a tall glass of cold tea and sugar and then added rum from the sideboard jug. Then he returned to the parlor and turned off the lamp and sat in the gray gloom of the morning and of his own thoughts and drank slowly.
Sneak up and shoot you dead while you were sleeping is what he meant to do. When he saw you werent here he run off because he’s too cowardly to try to shoot you any way but in your sleep.
That wasnt true and he knew it. The man was a sonofabitch but he wasnt a coward nor a backshooter.
Why’d he leave? Why not lay an ambush for when he got home? How come he didnt burn the house? He’d come ready to.
He drank and thought. Annie was right, the man was leaving. Not to Key West and Mexico. That was a bullshit story meant to distract him from looking for them along the upper coast until they were long gone. Jesus. How damn stupid did they think he was?
Well, he thought, he would either get away from J.R. and the boys or he wouldnt. In either case it would finally be done with.
He fell asleep in the chair and when next he woke it was the middle of the afternoon. His neck was sore. He could hear Annie and the girls laughing faintly in the kitchen. The parlor window was softly bright with sunlight. He got up and went to the kitchen and the girls rushed to him for a hug and Annie smiled and said she hadnt had the heart to wake him from the chair, he’d been so deeply asleep. He asked if anyone had telephoned and no one had. He assumed Sheriff Merritt and the deputies had not found Ashley and his gang in Vero or anywhere else. The man was gone, he was sure of it. He couldnt help smiling, and Annie herself seemed to brighten in the light of the good cheer.
He sat and sipped coffee and chatted with his daughters while Annie fried a steak and potatoes for him and sliced bread to toast in the pan with the steak juice. He cleaned his plate and then had a large serving of peach pie for dessert. Then his daughters took turns showing off for him by reading aloud long passages from their schoolbooks. He had not enjoyed himself this way in longer than he could recall.
Evening came on. While Annie fixed a fresh pot of coffee he called the station to see if his deputies had returned from St. Lucie County yet or files at report. The desk officer said he had been just about to call him. Elmer Padgett had telephoned not give minutes ago with a message.
“He said tell you they’re at the Sebastian River Bridge,” the desk officer said. “Said to tell you, ‘We’re on em,’ in exactly them words. I asked what that meant and he said you’d know. What the hell’s Elmer and them doing way up in St. Lucie, Sheriff?”
Bob Baker hung up and stared at the parlor window gone dark with nightfall.
It wasnt done with.
“We’re on them” wasnt the same as “We got them.” What if he was to get away? Maybe Tracey was bullshitting about Johnny wanting to go to Texas for good. Maybe Tracey was trying to put him off his guard. Maybe Johnny had been bullshitting Tracey.
Even if he did go away, who was to say he wouldnt be back? He’d gone twice now and come back both times. Tracey said he’d come back this time just to kill him. He had no trouble believing that.
Bob Baker could not have explained what he felt at the moment but its similarity to fear was enraging.
“Here you are, sir,” Annie said brightly at his side, holding out to him a steaming mug of coffee. He turned to her and she saw his face and her smile vanished.
He mumbled something about paperwork and turned away without taking the coffee and went to the den. He lit the lamp in his room and saw the rifle bullet set upright on the desk.
His chest went so tight he could hardly breathe. A sudden red pressure swelled behind his eyes.
He heard John Ashley’s laughter as plainly as when he’d run off in the rain after busting his head against the jailhouse wall, as plainly as when he took his leg and gun.
He could see him grinning as big as when he came out of the pineywoods behind Julie.
He picked up the bullet and closed his hand so tightly around it his fist trembled.
And then howled and drove the fist into the desktop and his knuckles left their imprint in the heavy wood.
And then spun and snatched up his gunbelt and stalked out to his runabout and roared away through the night toward the highway.
TWENTY-SEVEN
November 1, 1924
BY THE TIME ELMER PADGETT, SLEEPLESS AND HAGGARD, HAD tracked down his brother and the other two deputies and they all came together in Stuart it was almost noon. It was past two o’clock when St. Lucie County Sheriff J. R Merritt and two deputies he introduced as Wiggins and Jones met with them at the Bluebird Cafe on Orange Avenue in fort Piece.
As Elmer Padgett explained the situation the St. Lucie cops listened intently. J. R. Merritt had a reputation as a tough sheriff. There were rumors of rumrunners who had driven their loads into St. Lucie County and never been seen again. He’d been appointed sheriff by the governor two years ago and was facing his first election to the office in just three days. He was known to have political ambitions, and the public recognition to be had from busting up the Ashley Gang could be invaluable to his future. Listening to Elmer repeat what Ban Tracey had told Bob Baker, Merritt could not restrain a smile. He told the Palm Beach officers he was deeply grateful to Sheriff Baker for the opportunity to bring to justice such a bad bunch as John Ashley’s. “The question is,” he said, “was this Tracey fella telling Sheriff Bob the truth.”
He turned to a deputy and said, “Jonesy, why dont you go see if this bad-ass really is at Lillis’s place. We’ll be waitin for you at Rhonda’s.” Deputy Jones nodded and went.
Wiggins led the way in the St. Lucie police car and Sheriff Merritt rode with the Palm Beach deputies. He sat in the backseat with Elmer Padgett to one side of him and Henry Stubbs on the other, each one holding one side of a fluttering regional map he’d opened up. He tapped his finger on Vero where it lay about fifteen miles north of Fort Pierce. He knew Wayne Lillis and knew the marina where he lived in a piling house and docked his charter boat. he said it was not a good place to try to take a tough bunch. The house and boat were both at the far end of the marina and anybody approaching along the piers would be spotted in plenty of time to allow for a getaway. With his finger on the map he showed Padgett and Stubbs how the bandits could flee downriver to the Fort Pierce Inlet or upriver into the serpentine channels of the mangrove narrows—or go straight across to the barrier island and run north or south under cover of the high brush and then cross back to the mainland at some safer point.
“What about if
“
“All right then, what?” Henry Stubbs said.
