I started for him. He skipped back, yelling, “Tom!”
The goon came out of his chair in an easy rush. I got in one or two punches. That was all. He was a professional at brutality, and he did a workman-like job on me. He chopped me down like a woodsman felling a tree.
I landed flat on my face, my nose and mouth streaming blood over the rug. A big foot clamped down on the back of my neck. Dimly I heard Waner say, “That’s enough. I think he gets the idea. Don’t you, country-boy?”
I tried to curse, but blood choked me, and pain was moving in to flood the numb void of my body. I coughed weakly.
“Okay,” Waner said. “I’ll expect you by tomorrow noon.”
He and his goon left. Painfully I turned my head, watching them go. They didn’t say “Goodby.”
As soon as the screen-door banged shut, I heaved myself up, and by holding on to chair-backs, walls, whatever I could find, managed to stagger through the house to the kitchen. I got Ed Carson on the phone. I said, “Go.” And hung up.
The noise had finally awakened my wife, though the two boys slept on undisturbed. I heard Martha calling from the bedroom. I didn’t want her getting up, so I hurried to the closed bedroom door, opened it enough to say, “Go back to sleep, honey. I’ve got to go out for awhile. A case.”
Martha grumbled, “Will you be long? Where’re you going?”
“To put out a fire,” I said, and eased the door shut.
Back in the kitchen, I washed up, then found a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet over the sink and had a long drink. The whisky burned like fury on my split lips but, once it hit my stomach, I felt better, well enough to go out on the back porch. There I keyed open the little store-room, went inside and opened my old GI foot-locker. From it I took a mothball-smelling bundle of black cloth and my old .45.
Then I went on out to the garage, got my car, and left.
To get my mind off my aches and pains as I drove along the bumpy streets, I thought about Pokochobee County. It’s buried deep in the mountainous, sparsely-populated southern part of the state. A real backwater. We have radio, even television, and every Friday the weekly paper comes out, whether there’s any news to put in it or not.
But the important thing about Pokochobee County, just now, was that we could seal it off from the rest of the world as effectively as if it were on the moon. Which is why, of course, Gerald Waner and his crowd had been passed along to us.
Now I turned my car onto one of the county-seat’s two paved streets, and drove through the tiny business district. It’s a collection of crumbling brick buildings, housing shabby stores and shops with fly-specked display windows. There are large gaps here and there, where buildings have burned down, or simply fallen in from old age, and never been replaced. It’s an old town, an old county. But we like it.
I pulled into the driveway of Jim Kimmon’s service station. It was closed. So was everything else in town. Jim himself would be with the others, over on the deep-shadowed courthouse lawn, under the oak trees around the ancient courthouse.
There were cars parked all along the block between where I sat and the courthouse. I could make out men headed that way on foot, one by one, and in small groups.
All were dressed as I would be in a minute — black robes topped by black, conical hoods. I got out of the car, put on robe and hood, and walked toward the courthouse.
There I found perhaps twenty-five men, standing around in silence. One of them beckoned to me. It was Ed Carson. I joined him. “Ready to go?” he muttered.
“Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”
We went along the deserted, dark street to the La Grande Hotel. The men fell in behind Ed and me. At the hotel Ed said, “Alright, six of you come with us. The rest wait here.”
We entered the lobby. The night-clerk was fast asleep on a couch near the desk. I shook him awake. He opened his eyes, turned white, and his teeth started to chatter.
“Take it easy, Charley,” I reassured him. “All we want to know is the room number of a Mr. Gerald Waner.”
A little color came back into the nightman’s face. “Oh. I see. Yeah. Well, Waner’s in room 25 along with another guy. Three more men are with his party. They’re in the adjoining room, number 26.”
I nodded. “Okay. Go back to sleep.”
I turned to Ed. “That’s five men altogether. Let’s get them.”
We trooped up the old, creaking staircase to the second floor, found the two rooms we wanted. Ed had brought along the clerk’s pass-key. He used it first on room 25, then 26. He and I went into Waner’s room, while two of the other men took care of the goons in 26.
We herded the five of them together in the dimly-lit corridor. They raised a brief row. But our costumes, and our guns aimed at their bellies quieted them in a hurry. Only Waner had anything to say after that.
His silky white hair was a tousled mess, and his eyes swollen with sleep. But he could still talk. “Listen, what the hell is this? What are you, a bunch of thieves? We haven’t got enough cash among us to make it worth your while. Take off now. Go rob a bank or something. You don’t know who you’re fooling with, hear? Take off, while you’re able.”
I had been examining the faces of the five men. I found the one I wanted. A young kid, years younger than any of the others, and lacking their patina of coarse, sneering confidence. Likely enough this was the kid’s first “job” with the syndicate.
From the way he was trembling, I had an idea it’d be his last, if he had anything to say about it. I decided to give him a chance. “You,” I said, pointing at him. “Step out.”
He did. He started a half-hearted protest. Carson backhanded him and he shut up. The other goons began to look worried. Even Waner.
“Get the rest of this trash out of here,” I said. “I’ll be down directly. Alright?”
Waner began to jabber, but the muzzle of Carson’s pistol jammed between Waner’s ribs put a sudden stop to that. A couple of goons whimpered. They didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t like it. Where they came from, they were the ones who scared people, instead of the other way around.
Carson and our men herded them off down the hall and on down the stairs. When they were gone, I turned to the kid. Now that we were alone he got back a little confidence.
“Man, you don’t know what you’re doing,” he told me. “If you knew who we were—”
“I do know,” I said. “All about you.”
He hesitated. He looked pretty silly, standing there in his shorts and tee-shirt, shifting from one bare foot to the other. There was little of the big, bad hood about him.
“I want you to take a message back to your bosses,” I said. “Get ft straight, and tell them just what I tell you. Tell them not to send any more Gerald Waners down here. Tell them to keep out of this state.”
The kid’s mouth dropped open. He shook his head dazedly. “I don’t understand.”
“The syndicate will. Alright, get dressed. You have thirty minutes to be out of this town, and on your way out of the state. And don’t come back.”
“Bu... but what about Waner, and the others?”
“This is pretty wild country around here. It’s easy for four strangers to get lost in the hills, and never be found again. That’s all, Goodby.”
I left him standing there. I hurried downstairs, across the lobby, out of the hotel. There was a line of cars in the street, motors idling. I got into the first one and shut the door firmly behind me.
We moved out, slowly, through the dark deserted streets, like a midnight funeral procession. That’s just what we were.
Stop Killing Me
by Hal Dresner