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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Wednesday,
June 2, 1915,
concluded
The man ran in front of the truck and pointed the rifle right at their windshield. Annalee screamed. Thomas Duckett slammed on the brakes.
The man jumped on the passenger side running board and shouted at him over the terrified Annalee. “I’m Bob Ashley and you’d better get your ass moving right God damn now!”
Shaking, Duckett started the truck moving.
“Faster! Git goin’!”
The impromptu posse on foot had reached the corner, but Ashley pointed the rifle, no longer wrapped in paper, and they stopped but quick. A few turned and ran back around the corner. One brave man in a blue business suit stepped out with a pistol, but Bob fired three shots his way and sent him scurrying too.
Just then, a pickup truck spun around the corner from 12th Street and sped towards them. A police officer held a pistol out the passenger window while a man in a brown coat stood in the bed, also pointing a pistol at the fleeing truck.
Annalee was still shrieking, and Ashley was screaming back. “Shut up, God damn it! Turn here, old man!”
Duckett swerved at the last second, making the left onto 8th Street. Ashley was hanging on for dear life, while looking back at their pursuit. It had grown to several cars and trucks, some bulging with the men on foot who had jumped aboard and all bristling with rifles.
Tom Duckett took that second, while the madman on his running board was distracted, to kick the electrical cord attached to the magneto on the floorboard, trying to dislodge it. The truck lurched but didn’t stop.
Ashley shouted for him to “go like a bat out of Hell or I will blow your damn head off!”
How the hell did he think he would ever get that rifle in the window to shoot him without falling off? Try it, he thought grimly, please try it, but Ashley didn’t.
He kicked the power cable again |
Ashley stared in the window at him, but he looked away. The second the gunman looked behind again, he stomped that cable with his heel as hard as he could. The truck jerked, stalled, and finally came to a halt at Avenue G and 8th Street.
Duckett thought Ashley might shoot them then, but the cars that had been chasing them were coming, and Tom knew something about the rifle Ashley carried. In fact, he knew everything. He’d been a peacetime First Corporal in the Army, assigned to arms maintenance, and he held a certain hope in his heart: that this maniac would run out of ammunition in one or two shots. The 1903 held five rounds. Duckett had heard three shots. He didn’t know about the one that had killed Hendrickson, so did not know that Joe Ashley had only one shot left.
Stevens skidded left and sideways, early throwing Will Flowers from his perch in the bed of the truck. The passenger door was about thirty feet from the other truck, and Officer John Reinhart Riblet plunged out before the wheels stopped sliding.
He had his Colt .32 Pocket Hammerless in his hand and charged at Ashley, now standing with his rifle up beside the getaway vehicle. That is what Bob Riblet saw; a getaway car, driven, no doubt, by other members of the Ashley gang, bent on freeing their brother John. Everyone in town knew John was at the jail on 12th Street, and the expectation of an attempted jailbreak was such that the bookies were offering odds on the date, the time, and the likelihood of success of such an endeavor. Some took bets on how many would be killed, and who it would be. The odds were all for John; the bookies were paying nine to one on John’s failure and got almost no takers. If John Ashley was mostly a stranger to Miami, his legend, at least, had preceded him.
Time seemed to stretch out of shape for Officer Riblet. The noise on the street was deafening. He heard shouting from the men arriving in cars and trucks, heard screams from the truck, a woman, maybe that Upthegrove girl they said was an outlaw too?
He heard himself yelling for Ashley to drop his weapon, heard the outlaw screaming, not even words, just an animal screech. He saw him raise the rifle, fired his pistol, heard both shots almost simultaneously. He felt a terrific blow to his chin, and a slashing pain in his left jaw. He heard Eddie Stevens firing his Police Super .38 from behind the hood of the car. Several of his rounds hit the truck itself.
Ashley was on one knee, trying to fire the rifle again. There was blood on his grubby white shirt at the top of his ragged overalls, right about where his heart should be, and Riblet wondered wildly how the bastard was still alive.
He had a flash of pride. He’d been shot in the face and still plugged the son of a bitch who’d killed his friend Wilber! Right in the God damned heart!
He didn’t know how he was alive either and didn’t know Bob’s delay was because he’d forgotten the unmodified Springfield M1903 carried a five-round magazine, and he’d used them up. One had killed Hendrickson, three had run off the posse on the street, and the last one had entered Bob Riblet’s chin on the left side and torn out through his cheek. His teeth showed grotesquely through the mangled muscles of his face, but at that point he was not seriously injured.
Bob Ashley was hurt worse |
He was trying to raise the rifle, but the effort sent rippling waves of agony into his shoulder, his neck, his head and face. He could feel the broken ends of bone gritting together in his shoulder, like being stabbed with a filet knife, again and again. He pulled the trigger, hoping to at least scare the cops off, and heard it snap on an empty chamber.
He slung the rifle away, which convinced Riblet the murderer was now unarmed.
It was a fatal mistake. Ashley still had two Police Special .38 revolvers and an Army Colt 1911 .45 concealed on his person.
Bob Riblet advanced on Bob Ashley, his teeth gritted in a macabre smile, determined to arrest him and any of his crew from the truck who survived the confrontation. He was an honest, proud, upstanding officer of the Miami Police Department. He didn’t take bribes, he didn’t shake down business owners, and he didn’t shoot unarmed suspects, even if they had killed his good friend. Not even if his friend’s wife wanted him to. Not even if he wanted to, wanted to, oh, so badly.
Eddie had stopped firing from Will Flowers’ truck, probably reloading, but Will himself began banging away over the cab of the truck, except he was shooting at the other truck, not Ashley. He too thought the truck contained other gang members bent on absconding with the murderer John Ashley, and it appeared to him Bob Riblet had the shooter on his knees and was ready to cuff him.
Several more cars and trucks had pulled up, and armed men spread out across Avenue G. Desk Sergeant Eddie Stevens, his revolver reloaded, looked up and saw his friend Bob Riblet advancing on a known dangerous criminal and a vehicle containing at least two more members of his gang. He thought it was the bravest thing he’d ever witnessed. He was determined to protect such courage. “Cover him!” he shouted, and began shooting at the truck.
The men lined up on the street opened fire as well. Instantly the thoroughfare was a swirl of blasts, puffs of smoke curling out, shouts, smashing glass, the hollow, thumping rattle of bullets hitting wooden clapboard walls, the short, sharp punk, pong, ping as the stalled getaway truck was struck by hot flying lead, a scream.
Bob Riblet fired his pistol and hit the truck. Bob Ashley, still on his knees, pulled the 1911 Colt from his right back pocket, fired once as he swung it towards Riblet and missed, striking instead a cousin of Annalee Brickell some yards behind him, one Jonas Barnwell, shattering his left hip.
Riblet shot back |
John Ashley, in his cell in the Dade County Jail back on 12th Street, heard the shooting and commotion. It seemed to have started right next door, then headed south. Cars and trucks sped around corners and followed the noise, long guns sticking out from windows and truck beds. Following them were gangs of men on foot, many also armed.
An unarmed man in Miami in 1915 was the exception, not the rule. After several minutes a real firefight broke out a few blocks down, but at the jail, John heard something the crowd around Bob could not, due to the gunfire. John heard an explosion, somewhere to his right, which was west. Maybe a mile.
Then shots coming from that direction too. Just a few more miles that way was freedom, escape, the Everglades always ready to enfold him in her safe, loving, Spanish-mossy arms.
He knew what was going on. The boys were trying to break him out. The explosion, probably a gas station over on Military Trail, along with the shooting, was supposed to be a distraction. It didn’t sound to John like it was working. Whoever had made a move had jumped the gun, not waited until the other ruckus drew everyone away. It also didn’t sound like he was going to be sleeping in the loving arms of the Glades this night. Maybe for a long time. Maybe, never again.
The shooting stopped as quickly as it had started, and for interminable moments dozens of people stood staring in the street, staring at the blood and bodies, staring at the gun smoke that hovered in the still June air. Staring at something that should never, ever happen in their nice, safe town. There was a lot of crime, of course, but shootouts in the street? Miami wasn’t the damn Wild West.
As if time itself had stopped, it took a siren to jolt the crowd back into movement, to move forward, start really looking at the carnage.
He would never walk straight again |
Eddie Stevens cried over the body of Bob Riblet, which lay in the intersection of 8th Street and Avenue G. Eddie was trying to pull him up, shake him, make him live.
Somebody kicked the still-quivering body of Bob Ashley in the face, and Stevens shouted at him to get away, it was a crime scene.
Sheriff Dan Hardie, whose car had been blocked by all the possie’s vehicles, stomped through the crowd, waving at the gun smoke in his face, never mind the clouds of cigar smoke that followed him day and night. He fairly roared in the relative silence. “What the damn hell is goin’ on? And where the hell is John Ashley?”
A man in the uniform of the Dade County Jail, a white shirt and blue twill pants, spoke from the back of the crowd, moving up as he did. “He’s right where you put him, sir. This criminal never came anywhere near him.” He pointed his chin at the body of Bob Ashley.
It was then that a black woman screamed from the truck Ashley had tried to escape in. “It be Tom Duckett an’ Annalee Brickell! They’s done killt ’em!”
Dozens of armed men stood frozen, the smoke of their guilt wafting around them in the sizzling summer street.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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