“Why are you cooking so much?”
“We got company.”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“I just got a call,” George said. “Verne and Harvey are in town. Don’t that beat all?”
“What?” Kathryn asked. “Are you screwy?”
“They needed a place to sleep.”
“What the hell are they doing in Texas? They hate Texas.”
“Hand me some bacon out of the icebox.”
Kathryn plopped down at the little kitchen table and massaged her temples. She breathed, just trying to wrap her drunk mind around what George had done.
“Don’t get sore,” he said. “Make coffee.”
“You make coffee, you rotten son of a bitch.”
“Hey.”
“Don’t you know that we got work to do? Have you even read any of those articles I cut out? Do you know how broke we are? GMAC calls every damn day about the Cadillac.”
“I got that covered.”
“What? You and Albert are going to go knock over a gas station for ten bucks? This is real money.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” Kathryn stood, walked up to her large husband, and rapped on his forehead with her knuckles. “This isn’t some bank job in Tupelo. This is the score. And just as we’re getting ready, you want Harvey Bailey and that sadistic son of a bitch Verne Miller cutting in. You know they’ll want in.”
“Maybe we should cut ’ em in. They ’re good, Kit. They’re real good. I’ve worked with them, not you. It’s my ass.”
“And you want to cut the money another two ways?”
“Goddamnit.”
“Listen to what I’m saying.”
“That’s not it. Aw, hell. You made me burn the gosh-dang pancakes.”
She took a breath, damn glad she was drunk right now. She half walked, half stumbled back to the bedroom, where she pulled her new dress up over her head, down to her pink slip, and looked at herself in the long oval mirror. She was still good-looking at thirty, still had the curves but not too fat, and the dark hair and eyes she got on account of her Cherokee grandmother. Nice cheekbones. Like the makeup ladies told her at Neiman Marcus, good bones accounted for it all.
A black curl dropped over her eye as she studied herself, turning left to right, watching her profile and trying to remember that pout she’d caught from Claudette Colbert.
She wiped the dark red lipstick off her mouth with a rag and had just plopped into an unmade bed when George stuck his head in the room. “Honey, you mind making up the bed and sofa for the boys? They’re gonna be real tired.”
She didn’t answer, pretending she was asleep, but after he closed the door Kathryn turned over and clicked on a bedside lamp. From the middle of a thick family Bible, she pulled out a handful of neatly clipped newspaper articles from the
The headline read OIL MAN URSCHEL MARRIES SLICK WIDOW.
The union of the two fortunes will make the Urschels the richest household in the state and one of the richest in the nation. Charles Urschel began his career as partner of the noted Tom Slick, King of the Wildcatters, back when Oklahoma…
Kathryn read the story four times, each time with a pleasant smile, feeling much, much better about the world, before clicking off the table lamp and falling asleep.
Sometime about dawn she heard heavy feet and laughter and the clank of bottles and glasses and the smell of more burning bacon.
She lay there staring at the cracked ceiling, thinking of ways to send those two rotten bastards on their way.
THE NEWSBOYS CALLED IT THE “UNION STATION MASSACRE.” By the time Gus T. Jones was pulled from the shot-up machine, five men were dead. Sheriff Reed, the two Kansas City cops, Frank Nash, and the young agent. The boy’s name was Caffrey. Joe Lackey was shot in the arm, and the SAC was shot in the shoulder. Jones was pulled from the car without a scratch, and he walked the breadth of the brick streets, ringed by onlookers and police, and found the whole thing muted and curious, especially the way one of the big cops lay across the other, like twin boys sleeping in a river of blood.
Jones wired Hoover from the station.
Hoover cabled back that he’d send more men.
The afternoon heat was on them, and Jones stayed long after each man was picked up off the uneven streets by a pasty mortician and his wife and driven away on a flatbed truck. Jones had immediately sealed off the station while the cops put out a radio call for the Chevy. He personally interviewed twenty-seven witnesses, most of whom had been eating a morning meal at the Harvey House. A reporter had spoken to the woman at the Travelers Aid Society, and soon the word was that “Pretty Boy” Floyd and his gang were responsible. The hell of it was that Jones didn’t know who’d pulled the trigger or driven the car, or if there’d been two or a half dozen of ’em.
Every story varied. The gunman was short. He was tall. He was dark. He was light. He wore a gray suit. He wore a blue suit. He was handsome. The man was ugly.
When bullets fly, the last thing a person does is study faces.
The hatband on Jones’s Stetson had grown wet.
He walked back into the relative coolness of the station, the place feeling even more like a cathedral. He sat down on a long, lone wooden bench. A wide swath of light fell from the windows, and he tilted his face into the sun, pulling off his glasses and cleaning them with a handkerchief.
It was then he noticed the blood and gray matter across the lapels of his jacket.
Jones thought back to a box canyon nearly twenty years ago just outside Pilares, where some greenhorn Rangers and a lone Customs agent had followed Mexican bandit Chico Cano as he drove a herd of stolen horses back to Mexico. The canyon had been nothing but a trap, and soon Jones’s friend and the young Rangers had been pinned down by at least thirty bandits, two Rangers escaping and making for a nearby ranch where they got word to Jones. By the time he found the men, they were all dead. Shot a hundred times, faces unrecognizable after being smashed with rocks. The bandits had shot their horses, too, and stolen their saddles and guns. Some political types in Austin blamed the men who escaped for not staying in the canyon and fighting to the death.
Jones would never forget loading up those boys on mule back, the heat more than a hundred, the bloated bodies already busted and the smell so awful that it caused one of the animals to vomit.
It took years. But Jones got the saddles and the guns back.
And Chico Cano’s head, too. A gift from Pancho Villa.
“Sir?”
Jones slipped the glasses back on his face, bringing Union Station back into focus. Another young agent handed him coffee and told him he’d drive whenever he was ready to head to the office. Jones thanked him and drank the coffee by himself in that long wash of light. He cleaned his glasses again and, when no one was looking, wiped the brains and blood from his jacket, tucked the handkerchief into his pocket, closed his eyes, and said a short prayer.
Then he stood, checked his weapon, and walked back to the Western Union office.
The next cable to Hoover read AGENTS CANNOT WORK ARMED WITH PEA-SHOOTERS. PLEASE ADVISE.
