Jones stood as the train shifted onto another track, and he found purchase on an overhead rail. He emptied his pipe out the open window, feeling the hot summer wind on his face. Without much thought, he fingered the loose bullets in his right pocket, keeping the.45 revolver in a holster under the hot coat, despite the Justice Department’s policy about agents not carrying weapons.
“I think a federal cop is a screwy idea,” Nash said.
“Who asked you?”
“What makes you all any different from those goons in Spain or Germany?”
“I’d like to know what makes a con so damn stupid as to return to the prison where he escaped. If you hadn’t busted them boys outta Lansing, you might be sleeping on satin sheets at some hot pillow joint.”
“That wasn’t me.”
Joe Lackey raised his head and knocked up the brim of his fedora from his eyes with two fingers and said, “Sure thing, Jelly. Sure thing.”
Jones looked over at his old buddy Otto Reed and watched him sleep. Sheriff Reed looked ancient, out of step off a horse, out of place with the times. They only brought him along because he’d know Nash on sight. The old man was cut from the same cloth as Jones’s mentor, old Rome Shields back in San Angelo, who’d taught Jones to fight and shoot after his father’s heart had been pierced by an Indian’s arrow.
Jones clicked open his gold timepiece again, feeling the heft of his holstered gun.
Frank Nash watched him, looking like a circus clown with that naked white head and reddened face, smiling at Jones, knowing. Slats of light shuttered his profile as they passed under a wooden bridge and came out again in moonlight.
Jones didn’t like the look. It was the kind that always made him fold a hand.
HARVEY BAILEY KNEW THE MEET WAS ON THE LEVEL, A LITTLE diner right around the corner from Union Station in Kansas City, Verne Miller sending the signal that Jelly Nash needed a friend. And, brother, there was a lot you could say about Jelly Nash, but that bald-headed son of a bitch was there for Harvey when Harvey was serving a ten-stretch for bank robbery in Lansing, helping bust him out last month with a set of.38s smuggled into boxes of twine. Harvey, Jim Clark, “Mad Dog” Underhill, and a few more thieving sonsabitches walking out with the warden pretty as you please, Underhill holding him with a garrote like it were a leash.
That was all Verne Miller had to say, and there was Harvey sitting beside a redheaded woman in a red dress at the counter. The woman wanted some eggs and bacon after a little late-night action with Harvey, who’d picked her up at a colored joint where they’d watched Cab Calloway and his orchestra till three o’clock. When Miller walked in the door, the woman kept studying her nails, not even noting the two men were friends. Of course she didn’t know Harvey was married and had a kid, or even his real name. He’d told her that he was a traveling salesman of women’s nightgowns, wondering if the action could’ve been better if she’d known she was with the dean of bank robbers, the gentleman bandit who’d been knocking over jugs for more than ten years. She surely had read about some of his work, two million in cash and stocks from the National Bank and Trust in Lincoln a couple years back, or the U.S. Mint in Denver in ’22.
She’d liked his gray hair, his tailored navy suit and crushed-felt hat, and his jokes at the hotel when they’d finished up the first time and he’d hummed “I’ve Got the World on a String” as they cooled down under the sheets.
At the diner, he handed the gal some bus fare, patted her backside, and she was gone, the girl knowing the score as much as he did. Harvey moved onto a stool close to Miller and smiled as a goofy-looking fella in a paper hat refilled their coffee and seemed to be real impressed that Jean Harlow was in town, asking if they knew she was a hometown girl.
Miller just looked up from his coffee, and the boy shut his mouth and headed back to the kitchen.
“You sure know how to make friends.”
Miller shrugged.
Harvey had known Miller for years. He was a retired bootlegger, a part-time bank robber, and a full-time button man for the Nitti Syndicate in Chicago and the Jew Outfit in New York. Miller had been a war hero who’d come home from the trenches to be elected sheriff somewhere in South Dakota. And then he decided to take a nice cut of the county purse for himself and was run from town. Harvey met him after all that, when they’d been running whiskey down from Canada into Minnesota.
He was blond-haired and gray-eyed, movie-star handsome, a stone-cold killer who hated foul language-most of all when you used the Lord’s name in vain.
“Goddamn, it’s good to see you,” Harvey said.
Miller shifted his eyes to him. He’d yet to take off his gray hat.
The two men sat in front of the plate glass of the diner, the small space feeling like a fishbowl, brightly lit in the middle of the night. Miller shuffled out a cigarette from his pack of Camels and tossed the rest to Harvey.
“So what’s the score?”
“They got Jelly in Hot Springs at Dick Galatas’s place,” Miller said.
“That was kinda showy, wasn’t it? Prancing around Hot Springs like nobody would see him.”
Miller shrugged. “Two federal agents and some old sheriff.”
“What time?”
“Seven.”
“Who’s meeting them at the station?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
“You got guns.”
“I got guns.”
“We got help?” Harvey asked.
“Working on it.”
“How’s it looking?”
Miller shrugged.
“Goddamn.”
“I don’t like that kind of talk, Harvey.”
“I got a gun,” Harvey said. “A helluva gun that was supposed to help with some bank work, make some dough, and get me out of this lousy racket.”
“I can handle a Thompson.”
“I don’t want trouble,” Harvey said. “I don’t want any trouble. This can be as smooth and easy as we like.”
“I don’t like trouble,” Miller said, squashing out his cigarette. “I hate it.”
“Jesus, I just wanted to make a little dough and cash out,” Harvey said. “And this doesn’t do nothing but turn up the heat on all us.”
“It’s a square deal.”
“Am I arguing?”
THE MISSOURI PACIFIC STOPPED ONCE IN COFFEY VILLE AND rolled on through Roper and Garnett, curving east to Osawatomie and Leeds. The gray morning light hit the side of unpainted barns leaning hard into the wind and brushed across the windows of the train car. Jones watched Frank Nash startle himself with a hard snore and come alive with a start, reaching for a gun-like a man on the run was apt to do-but only getting a few inches and finding bound wrists.
He looked up at Jones, and Jones winked back.
Jones fingered bullets into the cylinder of his.45, spinning the wheel and clicking it back into frame. Joe Lackey was in the washroom shaving with a straight razor he’d bought from the negro porter.
“How ’bout some breakfast?” Nash asked.
“I hear they make a mean slop of grits in Leavenworth,” Sheriff Otto Reed said. Reed was a pleasant man with a stomach large enough to provide a good rest for crossed arms. He chuckled a bit at his own joke, and Jones smiled back at him.
Nash said, “Otto, sometimes you can be a true, authentic asshole.”
