Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (46) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Monday,
July 17, 1922,
continued

Lola looked from Red to Donnie, the worry inscribed upon her lovely face tearing at Red’s heart.
    “What do we do?” Donnie bit his thumbnail, clearly thinking. “Lola, you go in and stall Carter. He’s a sucker for a pretty face. Chat him up. Ask him all about whatever he’s doing. The man thinks with his, ahh…” and Donnie turned a bright pink in the face.
    Lola nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll have him talking till dinner time.” She kissed Red again, more tenderly this time, and said softly, “Don’t go getting yourself killed, Amion William Dedge. I’ve gotten rather used to seeing you around town.”
    Red said fervently, “I won’t,” then, as she turned to go inside, he gulped and said it again. Teeth gritted, almost to himself. “I won’t.” He was an ice-cold fish, a shark, and he didn’t need to look out for those sons of bitches, he thought. They’d best be looking out for him.
    Donnie was talking. “Red, you hide out in the tall weeds by the tracks, where you can see down the south wall of the laundry to 14^th. I’ll pull up in the Bearcat in about five minutes.” He then went back in the double doors and shut them tight. Red heard the lock bolt slide home.
    He duck-walked low, to his right back by the tracks, and found a thick clump of saw palmetto and Johnson grass where he could hide and still see down the south wall of the laundry.
    It couldn’t have been more than three minutes before Donnie Marshbanks whipped the Stutz in a u-turn and thumped up on the sidewalk with the right-side wheels. Red took off running like a scalded dog, and he could hear the walkway boards groaning under the car’s weight.
    Donnie was shouting, heedless of the noise. “Come on! They’re here!”
    Red reached behind him, struggling to pull his old Peacemaker from his belt in back as he ran. He was ten feet from the car when he tripped on a patch of sandspurs and nearly went down. He stumbled, recovered, and rather than run around the car, which had right-hand drive, he simply dove over Donnie into the left seat, almost rolling out the other side. The Bearcat also had no doors.
    Donnie hit the gas and the Stutz Bearcat lived up to its racing reputation, screeching wide rear whitewalls into blue smoke, and just as the sidewalk lumber collapsed, they were launched, bouncing, back north on 14^th Avenue, swerving recklessly across the packed marl street.
    R. D. Carter slammed the door of the laundry open as they flew past, pulling a .45 automatic and banging away at them, the girls in a screaming mass behind him. Bullets pinged off the roadster and Donnie winced, weaving even more.

“Dad is fucking going to kill me”

    Red heard him talking under his breath. “Dad is fucking going to kill me.”
    Red wanted to shoot but was terrified of hitting one of the girls in the shop. He knew Lola would be front and center; he could not shoot back. He stayed down until Carter had unloaded the eight shots a standard Colt .45 1911 carried, then popped up to look.
    Carter took one more shot that zipped past his ear, scaring the hell out of him. The bastard was sneaky enough to load one in the chamber, then add another to the magazine, for a total of nine.
    When they sped along 14^th past the Strand Theater, Red had no such worries about shooting as he’d had back at the Village Laundry. Roy Matthews was still hanging around the Strand, and Red shouted to Donnie just as Matthews turned to see what the commotion down the street was. “Slow down! Stop here!”
    Marshbanks looked back hard for half a second then slammed on the brakes, stalling the car.
    Red was fifteen feet from Roy “Young” Matthews, who had been sent to kill him. Sent by the same sons of bitches that had blown off Guy’s leg, and would kill them both, given half a chance. He stood up on the floorboard in full view; he wanted this piece of white trash to know who’d killed him. His Colt was in his hand, and as Matthews grabbed under his jacket for his own gun, Red shot him square in the chest.
    Roy was slammed against the fancy plastered wall of the theater, which held him standing for a moment, outlined with a spray of blood from the massive wound, a look of horror on his face.
    “I’m Red Dedge, God damn you, and that’s for my brother!” Red cocked and fired, cocked and fired, sending all six heavy .44 slugs slamming into Matthews’ body. Each impact seemed to keep the already dead man standing, body jerking, knees stuck out in front, so that only after Red had emptied his pistol into Roy Matthews did the man actually fall. His chest was a shredded mass of blood and flesh.
    Red heard Carter firing from down the street, but he leapt from the car and ran to Matthew’s body.

“What are you doing? Come on!”

    Donnie was screaming, “What are you doing? Come on!”
    Red dug in the corpse’s coat for his gun, another of the ever-present Army issue 1911 .45’s. He felt in the pockets for more magazines and was rewarded with two full eight-cartridge reloads.
    Donnie was frantically cranking the Stutz; thank God this model had the starter box on the dash and a battery to start it. The only worry was that, with its backwards-flowing carburetor it would sometimes flood when it stalled. Red heard it fire and turned to run.
    A bullet cracked off the theater wall, and Red was bent low, sprinting back to the car, firing the automatic at Carter, who was running towards them and far enough away from the laundry that Red didn’t worry about hitting anyone else.
    Donnie screeched away north but he was mad as a ’gator in a trap. “What in the hell were you doing?”
    Red held up the .45. “I’m out of ammo for my Colt, and I knew you wouldn’t be carrying iron, so I figured I needed this.”
    Marshbanks looked at him like a retarded child. “That’s the second time today you’ve pissed me off,” he grumbled.
    Another bullet from Carter snapped past the speeding car and Donnie pulled a sleek black Beretta 9 millimeter Glisenti and started banging away back down the street, looking in the side rearview and shooting left-handed.
    Damn, Red thought, trust Donnie to have the best. And it’s true: I have got to stop pissin’ him off. Some time back he’d considered that Donnie Marshbanks might be a good friend to have in a tight spot, but by God, helping him murder a man, even a man sent to kill him, on the street in broad daylight in his home town? He didn’t say shit when Red gunned down Matthews; all he wanted was to get away clean.
    On a Monday afternoon in the Village of Vero, 14^th Avenue south of 20^th Street was pretty much deserted. The Strand took up the first block on the west side, and two citrus packing houses stood across from the theater, closed for the summer. Like 20^th Avenue, 14^th ended four blocks south of 20^th Street at the grapefruit grove. There was nothing else there, no houses, no businesses.
    Red thought they might get away clean if the girls kept their mouths shut.
    At 21^st Street Donnie came to a full stop, then turned left and proceeded at a normal pace through downtown. Cool as a catfish, Red thought. He figured the bullet holes in the car wouldn’t be seen as long as they kept moving. What would happen when Donnie’s dad saw them was anybody’s guess.
    By the time the train station bell began ringing frantically, they were past 27^th Avenue and headed into a grove of Bearr’s lemons, already heavy with fruit.
    “Reckon somebody heard the shooting and found Matthews,” Red said unnecessarily, and Donnie looked at him with that expression again, the one that said “slow child.”
    “I reckon,” he said sarcastically. “What we need to worry about is Carter. He could fuck us, and the Sheriff would believe anything to get your young ass in the hoosegow.”
    Red was shaking his head. “Not dressed like that he’s not. They’d know in a second he was up to somethin’, the sum’bitch is usually in a business suit. He still had them fancy shoes on, too, and he’s packin’ a pistol at the scene of a shootin’, be awful hard to explain away. He’ll be gone like a fart in a hurricane.”
    Donnie looked at Red again, this time calculating. He apparently came to a conclusion, and allowed charitably, “You may not be quite as dumb as you look. Where’d you come up with that?”
    Red grinned in his face. “Where d’ya think?” It was his turn to be smug.
    Donnie’s shoulders slumped. “The Judge. Damn, I should’a knowed.”
    Marshbanks pulled into a side row of trees, stopped the car, set the brake but left it running. He went around to the tiny trunk and pulled two cold Stroh’s beers from a bucket of quickly-melting ice. He popped the top on one with the brake handle locking lever: he hooked the top on the thick metal and smacked the bottle down with his other hand, sending the top flying, and passed it to Red, who was suitably impressed. He popped the second and took a swig, gazed around the sun-dappled grove with a look of satisfaction.
    Red’s hands were still shaking, and he sucked half of his down in one shot. How could he be so cool when they’d just killed a man?
    As if he’d spoken aloud, Donnie said, “Been thinkin’ about that…back there.”
    So, he wasn’t completely cold-hearted about it, Red thought. Personally, he’d wracked his mind and soul over killing Kenny Frankenfield a thousand times.
    “Anyway, the fella you shot was Roy ‘Young’ Matthews, a known criminal, and associate of the notorious John Ashley, likely an actual member of the gang.”

Pabst Blue Ribbon had been reduced to making cheese

    Red took another gulp of beer-it was going warm fast in the heat, and it had to be at least three years old. Stroh’s had had to shut down brewing, like most of the thousands of other breweries, when Prohibition went into effect; these days, they made maple syrup. Pabst Blue Ribbon had been reduced to making cheese.
    “So what’re you sayin’? That nobody’ll care that a man was gunned down on the street, because he was a gangster?”
    Donnie had gone back to that look again, that implicitly questioned Red’s mental capabilities. “That’s exactly what I’m sayin’, and sure as you were right about Carter runnin’ for the hills, I’m right that nobody gives a damn about Roy Matthews or any other bank robber in that gang. Not around here they don’t. Maybe down in Palm Beach, but not here. Like as not there’s some folks here will even be happy about it.”
    Red sucked through his slowly diminishing supply of teeth. “I kinda doubt the Ashleys are ‘some folks’ in this sit’iation, and that still cain’t mean we’re in the clear even if nobody talks. Sheriff’s in cahoots with those rattlesnakes, the minute they get t’talkin’ he’ll know ever God-damned thing about it, you know he will.”
    Donnie nodded, and tossed his beer bottle over his shoulder into the weeds between the lemon trees. “Yeah, he will. But will he be able to prove any of it? Or want to? ‘Oh, well, Z Zeuchs told me his hired gun tried to kill Red Dedge for revenge, and Dedge wound up killing a member of the most notorious gang of bank robbers in Florida instead, who was also sent to kill him, so I want to arrest him.’ Just how do you think that would go over with a prosecutor? Or a certain Judge we know? You remember him, just so happens he’s your lawyer?”
    Red didn’t have to think for long. “It’d go over like a lead balloon, is what I think. How would he even know, if he wasn’t just as guilty? He could never admit that! Sum’bitch, they ought’a give me a medal, now that I cogitate on it.”

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens