Harv’ey watched Boss Shannon toss feed from a metal bucket to his chickens, those pin-eyed creatures scratching and squawking and shit-ting all around them. Boss moped and looked down at his brogan shoes when the bucket fell empty, standing there, hens pecking at his feet and at the empty ground, when he finally raised his head and asked: “Where’d you find him?”
“He was wandering in the pasture,” Harvey said, studying Boss’s face and coolly slipping his right hand into his pocket, squinting into the early morning. “His feet were all cut up, and he was talking to himself. I couldn’t make out a thing he was saying till we got him back to the car. Urschel thought I was Tom Slick. Imagine that. King of the Wildcatters.”
“You kill him?”
Boss thought of himself as a hero, the salt of the earth, a hearty country man bred of solid stock, with years of wisdom behind him. But Harvey Bailey only saw a white-haired old fool who was greedy and reckless and would sell out his own boy for a nickel. Harvey studied the man’s beaten face and drooped shoulders until Boss grew restless in the open yard, the empty bucket shaking in his hand.
“You gonna kill me?” Boss asked. “’Cause if you are, I need to talk to Ora just a moment. There are things that need tending, and I’d prefer if I could write my own eulogy.”
“How much are they getting?” Verne Miller asked, hopping down from the front porch of Shannon ’s house. He wore a big.45 in his waistband and a freshly pressed shirt.
“I don’t rightly know.”
“What was that hog’s name?” Harvey asked.
“I believe it was President Hoover,” Miller said. “I never saw a hog corn-hole a man before, but I believe it could happen. I think he liked the way you smelled. Imagine that wet snout on the back of your neck, Boss.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“How much?” Harvey asked.
“Two hundred.”
“What?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
“Don’t lie to us.”
“I swear on it.”
“Whew.”
“What are they going to do with Urschel?”
“Turn ’im loose,” he said. “They don’t mean no harm to him.”
Harvey looked to Miller. Miller shrugged.
“So they’re coming back?” Harvey asked.
“Of course.”
“And we’ll all have a meet,” Harvey said.
“Don’t seem right,” Boss Shannon said, gaining a sense of himself and splatting some tobacco juice into the dust. “Don’t seem fair.”
“YOU THINK HE’S DEAD, DON’T YOU?” KIRKPATRICK ASKED.
“If you study on the worst, the worst will happen,” Jones said. “They were never gonna release him in Kansas City. These are some pretty cunning men we’re dealing with. Real professionals.”
“You think they’re mad at me? For bringing you along?”
“If they’d been really spooked,” Jones said, “they wouldn’t have made the drop.”
“Tell me again what they said on the telephone.”
“He called me a fat old man. How do you like that?”
It was the middle of the night when the Sooner cut through south Missouri and over the Oklahoma state line, and not once had Kirkpatrick taken a drink. The whole ordeal seemed to have bled the nervousness from him.
“Maybe he was talking about someone else,” Kirkpatrick said.
The all-nighter was empty, and Jones stretched out his boots on the seat in front of him. He had a notebook open on his lap, and in the flickering artificial light he worked on a report to Hoover about the whole caper, from the time the kidnappers made contact through the letter to the drop just a few hours ago. The exchange had happened so quickly after Kirkpatrick had stepped from the Yellow Cab that Jones had lagged behind, and when he’d caught up on the street the Gladstone had already been snatched with Kirkpatrick barely seeing a thing.
Kirkpatrick had described the man. The same one Berenice Urschel had described as the big fella with the machine gun. About six feet. Foreignlo oking.
“I should’ve done something,” Kirkpatrick said. “If I’d brought my gun I could’ve forced them to take me to Charlie. If he’s dead, I’ll never forgive myself. I let down the family.”
“If you’d acted like a fool, then he would be dead.”
Kirkpatrick nodded. His eyes looked hollow, the skin on his face stretched to the bone.
“Like I said, these men are professionals. They had a solid plan. They carried it out and got their money. Now they’ll just look for a safe place to turn him loose.”
“What if he knows too much?”
“Quit studying on the worst and the what could be,” Jones said, snapping the notebook closed and placing it back in his satchel. “All we can do is wait it out. Mrs. Urschel will need a strong man with some horse sense.”
The train clattered and clicked and jittered down the line. Artificial light shone in ramshackle towns and went dark in vast stretches of country, empty and barren.
“What if he’s not back in twelve hours?”
Jones shuffled in his seat, reaching for his father’s gold watch. “We won’t know for another four hours.”
“But if he’s not back by morning…” Kirkpatrick said, the lights in the train car going out and then coming back on. The horn sounded lonely and bovine along the tracks, making their presence known in all that blackness. The moon disappeared under a thick blanket of clouds from the west.
“Then you can worry.”
“What if Charlie can identify them? What if he can lead you back to their hideout?”
Jones leaned back into his hard wooden seat and reached for his Stetson. He laid the hat over his eyes and crossed his arms across his chest. “Soon as he comes home, we get to work. Just think about that Kirk. Until then, this fat old man needs some shut-eye.”
The train sounded again, and Jones drifted off to sleep.
KATHRYN SLAMMED THE CADILLAC DOOR WITH A TRIP AND A laugh, feeling about nineteen with a honeymoon glow, while she followed George-him telling the same joke he’d been repeating for the last two hundred miles-up onto Boss Shannon’s crooked porch, not seeing Boss, only Albert Bates. Bates just looked at George and slowly shook his head, and she saw George’s face change in an instant, and he grabbed the screen door that slammed behind him. Inside she heard raised voices and arguing.
Bates stepped in front of her and put up a hand. But Kathryn tossed it aside and followed George on in, past all of Ora’s knickknacks and collector spoons and glasses she’d gotten for free at movie shows, shelved above their brand-new RCA. Her fists were clenched down below her sides, and she marched right next to George, who was talking to that bastard Harvey Bailey.
Bailey sat at her momma’s kitchen table, foot up on a chair and holding a cane. He had a preacher’s smile on his face as he was trying to talk in a cool, relaxed voice about George coming to his senses.
“ Harvey, why the hell are you still here?” she asked.
“George,” Bailey said, motioning with his cane, “get her ass out. This is man talk, and we don’t need your wife to discuss business.”
“There’s no business, you big-nosed moron,” she said.
“Mr. Charles F. Urschel is some kind of business.”
Kathryn stopped, and she could hear her own breathing. Her fists worked at her sides, and she looked at Bailey with a clenched jaw, but she said sweetly, “Have you gone screwy?”
“Mr. Urschel is ready to get home,” Bailey said. “Had a real scare yesterday when he decided to take a little walk. But we got him a drink, and he’s gone back to sleep. All ready for a drive.”
“Don’t you even think about muscling in on this, you goddamn lousy, worthless sack of shit.”
“George,” Harvey said, using the cane to stand. “Please. I don’t discuss business with women. Give the lady a boot.”
George reached around her waist, and Kathryn relaxed for a moment, thinking George was going to draw her close and tell Bailey to go fuck himself. But instead he picked her up off her feet and tried to carry her out of the house. She broke free and ran for Bailey, wanting to wring his neck and scratch his eyes out. George caught her and hauled her backward, her heels digging deep into a rug all the way out to the porch, where he tossed her out like an unwanted cat.
She landed on her butt and stared up into Albert Bates’s mug.
“If that don’t beat all.”
“I saw it comin’,” Bates said.
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“I thought you saw it coming, too.”
“What do they want?”
“A third.”
“What’s that?”
“Sixty-six thousand.”
“They can go fuck themselves.”
“I agree,” Bates said. “But now they have Mr. Urschel.”
“He’s not with Potatoes?”
“The boy’s got him, but he’s scared of Miller.” Bates shook his head and tossed a butt onto the porch. He ground it up real good with the heel of his shoe.
“The cut’s gonna get a little deeper, too,” Bates said. “Bailey wants George to use Kid Cann’s outfit in Saint Paul for the wash.”
“That lousy Jew? Who in their right mind would trust him?”
“Bailey says he’s honest. He’s usin’ him for his own stash.”
“That’s a hell of a recommendation.”
George busted out of the front door, red-faced and sweating, and not the joking boy from the car ride. He grabbed Kit’s hand and walked her way the hell out from Boss’s house into the parched land where Boss grew his paltry crops. The dry and cracked ground still held the bent and dry stalks of corn blowing slightly in the hot wind. The old windmill twittered and twirled like the hands of a clock wound too tight.
“Listen to me,” George said, pulling her hands together at the wrist. “Listen. I talked him down to ten grand. They drive Urschel back.”
Kit shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She breathed in through her nose and kept on crying, goddamnit. Like some kind of baby.
“Kit.”
“You pussy.”
“Kit.”
“Don’t you dare take it in the ass from that son of a bitch,” she said.
“It’s been decided.”
“Among men?”
“Yes.”
“I think you and your buddies from the Green Lantern Saloon are about as tough as a sewing circle,” she said. She grabbed the back of George’s big neck and pulled him in close to where their noses touched. Both of them were breathing hard from all the talk and excitement and the heat. Far off in the trees, some cicadas clicked and whirred. An old hound came loping out from the barn and lay down at George’s feet, but Kathryn kept on. “I know. I know.”
“What?”
“Kill him.”
“I can’t kill Harvey.”
“Not Harvey,” she said. “Urschel. You go with that dumb yegg like you’re okay with the deal. And when he takes you to Urschel, I want you to take out that.38 and put a hole right in the center of that rich man’s head. I never wanted you to take him back anyway. He can make you and Albert. He’s been to my momma’s house. He’s eaten her chicken, for fuck’s sake.”
George stood there in the heat with his mouth wide open.
Kathryn leaned in and gave him a big kiss on his stubbled mug. She kissed it again and again until his mouth closed and his eyes focused, seeing the sense in what she’d said.
“Do it,” she said. “Go do it now.”