Life's Work (28 page)

"Straight in," Bluerock said, and swallowed hard.

I took a big deep breath. "Pull up in the driveway and park behind the last car. We have to take Mickey out first. Get out of the car and shoot him. Aim low. Try to hit him in the middle of the body. You've got five shots, so don't waste any. And reload as quickly as you can. You do know how to load that thing?"

He nodded.

"Once we knock Mickey down, we go straight through the door. Blow the damn thing off its hinges and go straight in, like a narcotics bust. For chrissake, don't waste time. Straight through the door. Shoot anything that shoots back."

"Anything?"

"We don't have time to ask questions, Blue."

"What about Bill? And the girl?"

"They'll have to take their chances. They've got a better shot at surviving us than they do of surviving what Walt has planned for them."

"Who goes in first?" he said. "Whoever gets to the door first."

"Okay," he said. "Let's do it."
 

Bluerock started up the engine, put the car in gear, then turned in his seat to face me.

"It's been good knowing you, sport," he said with his bulldog look. "I owe you a drink or two after this is over."

"We'll get drunk as hell," I told him.

He turned back to the steering wheel, put one hand on it, and grabbed the shotgun in the other.
Blue eased the car out on the highway, backed into the turnaround, and headed south toward Mary Reno's house.

In less than a minute I could see the light on the porch, glimmering through the pine trees. Then I could see the porch itself, and Mickey standing there. He lowered his arms when he saw our headlights -to hide the machine gun. The door behind him was situated in the middle of the A-frame window. The window was heavily draped, but there were lights on inside, filtering through the muslin folds of the curtains.

Bluerock slowed down as he got close to the driveway. I clutched the shotgun in one hand and grabbed the door handle in the other. As we turned into the driveway, Mickey took a step off the porch. He peered at us quizzically, squinting through the headlights.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. Bluerock pulled to a stop and I shouted, "Go!"

As soon as he opened the car door, Bluerock dived to the ground, rolling across the grass yard to his left. Mickey raised the machine pistol to his hip and trained it on Blue. By then I was out of the car with the shotgun at my shoulder. I fired as soon as the shotgun barrel cleared the roof of the car. The butt of the shotgun slarnmed back into my shoulder and the muzzle flash looked as if it extended all the way to where Mickey was standing. The roar of the piece was incredible -like a thunderclap.

I'd aimed low -too low. The pellets hit Mickey below the knees, taking a bite out of the pavement that he was standing on and raising a cloud of cement dust and shrapnel, as if a grenade had gone off at his feet. Mickey fell backward, firing the machine gun as he went down. The gun made a vicious rattling brrapp!, spewing fire like the shotgun. The bullets flapped through the pine trees with a sound like a flock of birds taking flight.

I saw Bluerock leap to his feet. Then I was around the car and heading for the front door. I almost tripped over Mickey as I ran to the stoop. It didn't register at that moment, but one of his feet had been blown off at the ankle and was still standing, in its shoe, on the cement walk. There was blood everywhere on the walk and the grass.

As he came up to the door Bluerock fired the shotgun from his hip. The wood exploded as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball, leaving a gaping hole in its center. Shoulder down, Blue crashed through the hole, firing as he went. I was right behind him.

The blast of his shotgun had smashed a table lamp on the far wall. It was sparking like a firecracker on its broken base. One of the drapes had begun to smolder, and there was already a good deal of smoke in the room. I fired one blast to my left as I came through the door, tearing a hole in an overstuffed sofa. And another blast straight in front of me. I didn't see Walt or Habib but I knew they were firing back at us. I could hear the brrapp of a machine pistol and the whizz and pop of the bullets as they shattered furnishings and windows and tattooed the plaster walls. I dived to the floor behind the sofa. I could see Bluerock crawling behind a table a couple of yards to the right of me. I shoved a few more rounds in the shotgun. Pumped it and came up, firing.

I hit someone on the far side of the room. I heard him groan and cry out, "I'm hit!"

I pumped again and kept firing in the direction of the cries. There was so much noise and so much smoke in the room that there was no way to pick a target. I fired at the sound of the guns and at the shifting shapes in the smoke. I fired five times, dived back down behind the sofa to reload, and felt my right arm go numb. I didn't know how many times I'd been hit -I didn't even know, until then that I had been hit. But when I looked down at my body, I saw that the right half of my shirt, from shoulder to wrist, was soaked with blood. I sat behind the sofa, breathing hard and listening to the machine pistol go off again and a shotgun roar. I pulled the Colt out of my belt with my left hand and stood up, firing at the muzzle flash of the machine pistol. I fired seven times, flipped out the empty clip and slammed in the fresh one with my bad . hand, firing seven more times into the smoke and wreckage. It wasn't until I'd squeezed off the last shot that I realized that I was the only one still firing.

I threw the pistol to the floor, scooped up the shotgun, braced it against my left leg, and pumped it with one hand. I started across the room, but my legs wouldn't hold me, and I went down heavily on my knees.

I must have sat there for a full minute, listening to the dead silence of the room, watching the smoke swirling and sliding along the floor. Thrrc was a police siren wailing in the distance. It was another minute before I realized that they were headed our way.

I tried to get up again, but I couldn't stand. I'd lost too much blood. I crawled back toward the door, using the butt of the shotgun to pull me along. Somewhere in the chaos of the room something made a thud. If it was Walt or Habib, there was no way I could protect myself any longer, so I didn't worry about it. I kept crawling, back to the spot where I'd last seen Bluerock.

He was still there, lying faceup behind the table, the shotgun in his hands. I couldn't tell if he was alive or not, but he'd been hit full in the chest. There was blood pulsing out of his shirt. There was blood everywhere on his face and on the floor around him.

I stared at him sadly and wondered what had happened to his friend Parks in all that smoke and madness -to the man for whom he had given his life. Something made a noise to my right. I looked up, dizzily, expecting to see a gun barrel pointed at me. Instead, I saw a cop, pistol in hand, staring into the room with a look of shock on his face. He was the last thing I saw before I passed out.
 
 

They took me to a hospital in Missoula. I'd been hit three times. Once in the right shoulder. Once in the right hand. And once in the side. I should have died, the doctor told me. Like Bluerock.

He had been declared dead on the scene. Him, Mickey, Walt, and Habib. And Clayton, too. Phil Clayton. Nobody seemed to know what he'd been doing there. Whether he was negotiating with Walt or trying to entrap him. The Cincinnati Police finally decided the matter by choosing to make a hero out of him. And out of me too.

They sent Al Foster up personally to tell me the good news. By then I'd been in the hospital for two weeks, and my wounds had healed sufficiently to allow me to be wheeled around by a pretty, no-nonsense nurse named Flo.

Al found me in the hospital cafeteria, sitting in my wheelchair.

"How ya doing, Harry?" he said, sitting down across from me at the table.

I did a double take and smiled at him. "I've been better."

"I hear you lost a foot of intestine," he said.

"And a piece of my palm." I waved my bandaged hand at him.

"That's tough." He looked at me Grr a nrennent and shook his head. "You're crazy, you know that?"

I nodded at him. "You here to take me back?" I said.

"I'm here to decorate you," he said.

"You're kidding."

"Nope. You've got some friends in high places. Even old George stuck his neck out on this one. And your friend Petrie at the Cougars too. George is going to testify that he swore you in as a special deputy before you left town -you and that guy, Bluerock. And Petrie is going to pick up the tab for your medical expenses. You're a lucky guy."

"A lucky guy," I said with a laugh.

"The bad news is that Clayton's getting a medal, too. His last one, thank God. Six, two, and even, he was up here planning to sell Parks out. After that, I don't know what he had in mind. Some double cross, probably, that would have snared Walt Kaplan and made Phil look like a hero." Al pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. "And now he is a hero. The way we're going to tell it, he was with you when you busted Kaplan. He was on your side and got killed in the shoot-out."

"That stinks," I said angrily. "For all I know, he shot me. Or Bluerock."

"I know, Harry," Al said soothingly. "But it's just too ugly the other way."

I stared at him for a moment. "I'm not going to go for it;-Al. When I get home, I'm telling the truth. I owe it to Bluerock."

He sighed. "Think about it, Harry. You're not going to do Bluerock any good now. And you're going to make bad trouble for yourself."

"I can stand a little trouble," I said.

He laughed. "So it would appear."
 
 

We sat there for a while, talking. When Al got up to leave, I asked him what had happened to Parks. No one at the hospital had been willing to tell me, although I'd questioned a dozen people.

"He's right here," Foster said. "Up on the third floor in the psychiatric ward. He's got nothing left upstairs, according to the doctors. And he's got terminal cancer to boot. They can't ship him back to Cincinnati to stand trial unless he goes into remission. And the chances are that that's not going to happen."

"How long's he been here?" I said.

"Since the day you got shot. Apparently he got sick that morning and some friend of his, some woman, brought him into the Emergency Room." Foster smiled. "Bill gotta break there -or, at least, his girlfriend did. Because from what we can piece together Walt and Phil showed up at the woman's home right after she and Parks left. They didn't know he'd been hospitalized. They'd figured he'd gone out and that he'd be back later in the night."

"Instead, we showed up," I said, savoring the blackness of the joke. "We did it all for nothing."

"Sorry, but that's the way it figures," Al said with a mordant grin. He got to his feet. "So long, Harry." He raised his hand. "See you in the papers."

"So long, Al," I said.

Later that afternoon, when Flo was busy tending another ward, I worked my way out of bed, got into the wheelchair, and wheeled myself out to the elevators. Tbe ugly little irony that Al had left on my plate had begun to stink. We'd done it for nothing. For sport. For the sake of a stupid locker room code. And Blue had ended up dead. And Clayton had ended up a hero. And Parks . . . I just wanted to see him -once. To let him know how much his friend had sacrificed to keep him alive. Only they wouldn't let me talk to him when I got to the psychiatric ward. Just stare at him from a distance, as if I were still a spectator in the stands. I could see him from the nurses' station at the far end of the ward. He was in a steel frame bed beneath a big barred window. The sun was shining through the window, lighting up a patch of floor and the sheet on the bed. His mother was sitting in the shadow beside his bed, reading from a hook in her lap. She looked at Parks now and again. He looked at nothing. He was staring at the wall across from his bed, out the far window, at the blue sunlit sky. His face looked ravaged, thin and sunken. His eyes said nothing. They just stared out at the distant mountains beyond the barred hospital window.
 

It was almost fall by the time I was released from the hospital. The first person I called when I got back to Cincinnati was Mike Sabatto at the Post. Somebody needed to know the truth, although I wasn't sure he'd print it. But somebody needed to know.

He agreed to meet me at the Busy Bee. I showed up about a half hour early and went over to the bar to say hello to Hank Greenburg.

He smiled affectionately at me as I sat down at the bar.

"Long time no see," he said, pouring me a Scotch and pouring one for himself. "I'm glad you're back, Harry. I'm glad you're okay."

I smiled at him.

He raised his glass in a toast. "Who we drinking to?"

"To Otto Bluerock," I said, picking up my glass.

"He used to play football, didn't he?"

"Yeah."

"I think I read where he got killed."

"Yeah," I said. "He got killed."

"To Otto Bluerock, then," Hank said, downing the Scotch in a gulp and smacking the glass down on the bar. "Hail and farewell."