I laughed too. “Damn sure does,” I said. And told myself he did.
We’d been nursing our rum like it was the last to be had in Texas. One drink apiece was all we were allowing ourselves till the job was done. And now, at a little before nine, it was time to get to it.
We were out to rob Gus Scroggins, the El Paso bootlegger Mona Holiday had mentioned. He was making a delivery tonight to his Blackpatch buyer, a local whiskey dealer named Lester Wills, who would have five thousand dollars to pay for the load of white lightning. Scroggins transported his moonshine in barrels loaded on trucks that looked like every other oil truck in the region. He had two deliveries to make en route from El Paso and would be carrying the proceeds from those deals—ten thousand dollars, according to Bubber’s inside man—when he met with Wills. We were looking at a take of fifteen grand in greenbacks and a load of hooch worth another five.
The transaction was to take place in an abandoned oil camp about a mile north of the Blackpatch junction road. The only way to get there was over a narrow trail laid out by an oil company that had drilled all over the region before striking it rich in Copper Hill. We’d been out there earlier in the day to have a look at the place and lay out a plan. The trail meandered around sandhills and gullies strewn with scrawny tumbleweeds, around rocky outcrops and thick patches of scrub brush. Before you’d gone a hundred yards you were out of sight of the road. At a couple of points along the trail, the oil crews had cut clearings wide enough for truck turnarounds. The camp itself had occupied a circular clearing roughly fifty yards in diameter and almost entirely enclosed by a thickly shrubbed, stony rise that had served to protect the place from windstorms. A ramshackle wooden derrick stood over a litter of oil drums and castoff machine parts. Gus Scroggins liked to make his deliveries on moonbright nights in case the Texas Rangers somehow got wind of the deal and figured to charge in and make a pinch. A lookout on the derrick could spot them coming in time to give ample warning. The bootleg party could scatter on foot into the darkness beyond the rise and the Rangers wouldn’t be able to give chase in their cars over that rugged terrain.
For the last two hundred yards before reaching the clearing, the trail assumed a slight upward grade and was flanked on both sides by high dense brush. But about forty yards from the entrance, we’d found a small open spot in the scrub. We could pull in there and turn the car around to point back toward the trail, hidden behind a pile of tumbleweeds and loose brush and ready for a fast getaway.
By ten o’clock that’s where we were, sitting in the scrub shadows and watching the trail. A bright gibbous moon was midway up the eastern sky and illuminating the countryside with a ghostly blue light. The air smelled of creosote and warm dust. The Ford was well camouflaged, its license plate freshly transplanted from a car parked in the alley behind a Blackpatch pool hall. Buck and I carried a pair of pistols each—he’d given me one of the two .44 revolvers they’d taken off the payroll guys. Besides his pistol, Russell had the Remington pump.
A few minutes before eleven we heard the distant growl of a car motor from the direction of the junction road. We peered over the scrub and spied it, small and dark against the moonlit landscape, coming slowly and without lights, raising only the barest trace of dust as it wound its way toward us, now and then going out of view as it went into a dip or behind a rise. We knew it was the advance men, checking for anything out of place, for signs of a trap by Rangers or rival bootleggers or hijackers like us.
Buck had the army automatic in his hand, and I drew the .44 from my front waistband. The longbarrel .38 was snugged against the small of my back. As the car got closer we hunched back down in the scrub and sat still and quiet as stones. Pretty soon it came easing by with its engine rumbling and tires crunching over the stony trail. A black Oldsmobile sedan. Through a gap in the scrub I saw the silhouettes of two men in the car.
The Olds passed out of sight into the clearing behind the rise. We heard the engine slow to an idle and a door squeak open and bang shut—one of the guys getting out to check things on foot. The engine rumbled as the car took a slow turn around the clearing. Then its dark shape was again at the trailhead and the headlights flashed on and off, twice, in swift succession. Exactly the signal Bubber said his inside man had described. The Olds then backed up into the clearing and its motor shut off. A door opened and shut. Faint unintelligible voices. Low laughter.
Russell grunted and pointed south. Another unlighted car was coming our way. Lester Wills and his five grand. Him and his driver.
Buck patted me on the shoulder to let me know he and Russell were heading off. They pulled their dark bandannas up over their mouth and nose and tugged down their hats and vanished quietly into the brush. The camp shithouse had been placed outside the camp, at the bottom of the slope, and a path to it had been worn over the scrubby rise. Buck and Russell could quietly follow the path up through the scrub and come down behind the advance men.
I stayed put and watched the approaching car. If it had done anything other than keep coming I would’ve hurried to inform Buck and Russell. But the car steadily advanced. When it closed to within a hundred yards, I pulled up my bandanna mask and hustled away to the clearing.
The moon was higher now but the derrick’s shadow still reached across the west side of the clearing and angled halfway up the slope. The Oldsmobile was parked in front of the derrick, one of the men slouching against a front fender, his hands in his pants pockets. I couldn’t see his face under his hatbrim but his head turned to follow me as I jogged across the clearing and over to a row of barrels in the derrick’s long shadow. It looked like everything was going according to plan—Buck and Russell had taken them by surprise and disarmed them, then put one guy in the Olds’ trunk and told the other to perch on that fender and keep his mouth shut. I couldn’t see them but I knew Buck was in the shadows of a clump of yuccas near the entrance to the clearing and Russell somewhere behind the low outcrop to my right.
I was surprised to feel my pulse thumping so hard in my throat, to find my mouth nearly spitless. We’ll play it any way we have to—that was Buck’s instruction. It seemed to be taking too long for the car to get here. I thought maybe it had turned back, maybe I’d been spotted as I made for the clearing and they had retreated in alarm.
And then there the car was, a shiny Plymouth coupe, rolling slowly into the clearing. I cocked the .44.
The Plymouth made a half-turn and stopped parallel to the Olds, next to the man on the fender. The passenger door opened and Lester Wills got out. We’d had a look at him earlier that evening at a speakeasy a block over from Mona’s place, and even in this light there was no mistaking the pompadour he took such pride in he would not cover it with a hat. The driver stayed put and kept the motor running.
“What the hell you doing?” Wills said to the man. “You suppose to be in the car.”
A detail we hadn’t known.
Now Wills was looking up at the derrick and saying, “Yo, Walsh! You see them? Walsh? Hey, what the hell…?”
The man on the fender said something too low for me to make out. Buck yelled, “Stand fast, mister!”—but Wills was already spinning around and diving back into the coupe, hollering, “Go!”
Buck’s pistol started popping and showing bright yellow muzzle flashes as the car’s back wheels ripped through the sand and the Plymouth slewed toward the barrels I was hunkered behind. I jumped aside as the car made a tight turn and the open passenger door hit some of the barrels and sent them clangoring end over end.