Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (57) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
March 31, 1918,
concluded

Moses sent Gaius running ahead to the prison, and by the time they got the wagon there, the gate was open and Warden Blitch was shouting and pointing, organizing a search party. Nine men galloped off right after the work gang got through the gate, all carrying twelve-gauge semi-auto shotguns and riding far better mounts than the poor mutt led by the young black convict.
    The mare had happily trotted along with Gauis, relieved of the weight of a rider and anticipating her stall and her feed bag. Gaius fed her, stroked her head, talked to her softly in the night. She loved him.
    Moses pulled the wagon up to the doors of the prison infirmary, and several of the men lifted Belvedere and carried him up the porch steps and through the door.
    The doctor was a fussy little man who dressed more like a dentist, in a tight white lab jacket, with silly round wire spectacles and muttonchop whiskers that belonged in the 1890’s. He shook his head over poor Marcus’ many contusions and broken bones. Belvedere’s eyes were both swelled completely closed, and his jaw required wiring shut. His face and chest were a mass of bruises, and the doctor never could decide if he’d cracked a collarbone. His knuckles looked like ground beef, proving he had given all he had in the fight; two young felons against one brave old man.

Moses was the first dragged before the Warden

    While the doctor fussed over Belvedere, Blitch organized something else, an inquiry. Moses was the first dragged before the Warden’s big cherrywood desk, wringing his soft cap in his grimy hands.
    Blitch got right to the point. “Moses, you a fine nigger, ain’t never give us a lick a’ trouble, and you the strawboss on that road crew. Now I need you to tell us what-all happened out there, and what you or your boys knew about it.”
    Moses shook his head firmly, his eyes not quite coming up to meet Blitch’s apparently friendly face. Not looking him in the eye didn’t make Blitch think he was lying; no black convict looked a white prison guard in the eye unless he wanted a beating.
    Moses knew not to trust Blitch’s mild opening; he understood perfectly well that if he or any of his boys were caught out, they would all hang. All the black ones at least. “Nossuh, we din’t know nuthin ’bout it suh, dem boys jus’ lit out, like dey had it all planned out ’head’a time. We’uns all heard ’em, a’gangin’ up on ol’ Marcus, dey get de drop in him and pull him off de hoss, what we figger. We hears a shovel hit ol’ Marcus, Lo’d knows we knows what a shovel sound like, must’a been on de haid, ’cause ol’ Marcus, he head so hard, dat shovel ring like a Church bell com’a Sundy mo’nin’…”
    Blitch and his men had to laugh, it was too true not to be funny.
    Then Moses frowned, turned serious, and they saw it, and shut up to listen. They might suspect him of conniving, but knew Moses was no dummy.
    “Dem boys beat ol’ Marcus so bad, we heer’ed it, he be hollerin’ come to Jesus. Dey just keeps beatin’ an’ beatin’ him, but he be hittin’ dem back, we heer’ed dem holler, time or two. Braves’ thing I ever see.” Moses explained why they couldn’t come to Marcus’ rescue in time due to how far into the tall weeds the ambush had occurred, that and they had worried they would be taken for runners themselves.
    He might have exaggerated the distance a bit, but he wanted to establish Marcus’ innocence, point out his bravery, and generally save his ass from being fed to the ’gators. John Ashley was one damn big fish to let get away.
    Blitch and his men were sure to catch their share of the hailstorm of turds about to pour down from the seven hills of Tallahassee, and John’s plan was to spread that storm as far as possible. That way, Blitch would want no rumors of prisoner plots, and would be as eager as anybody to minimize any connivance on the part of his men, to the authorities and the press.

Blitch knew  some of  his men were on the take

    Blitch wasn’t stupid; he knew some of his men were on the take, but it was hard to prove, not to mention unpopular. These men didn’t make much, and they had families to feed too. Hell, looked at that way, he was on the take, too. He figured Moses and his boys were probably involved, but what had they done, really? They hadn’t run, hadn’t done anything but watch an escape and bring back the victim. Maybe saved his life. Captain J.S. Blitch, of the Florida Department of Corrections, thought of all those cases of rum and gin, the hookers, the money, all provided by John Ashley, and his bowels felt loose. He had to run to the can, and was heard vomiting violently.
    After every man on the road crew had been pressed for answers, and had all come up with mostly similar versions of their story, Blitch and his top men locked themselves in his office with cigars and a bottle of John Ashley’s finest Lemon Hart Royal Navy Rum, and tried to see their way through the coming shit storm. They agreed that their best hope was for their posse to catch the absconders, but none of them thought it likely. John was smart, probably smarter than they were. He was rich, far beyond their own limited horizons. He could and did run a large, profitable criminal enterprise statewide and into Georgia and Alabama as well, all from Raiford State Prison. He would have a getaway car, probably several, with armed henchmen there to bust him loose even if it meant shooting it out with the law.
    “Hell,” Blitch said at one point, “them sumbitches got machine guns for God’s sake. If he gets to his gang, our guys won’t have a chance.”
    The day shift lieutenant, George Morford, asked, “What if we take down some of the boys on John’s payroll? Like we had this big investigation. They had to be in on it.”
    Morford was a hulking bull of a man, over six feet, with a short, thick pelt of black hair and a single bristling eyebrow across his wide forehead. And normally, Blitch thought, shaking his head, George wasn’t this dumb.
    “Jesus. Of course they were in on it. So, we admit we had him for sixteen months and he had a ring of paid informants right under our noses? Take some time and think a little more about that, George.”
    He looked around the room, and six very worried men looked back. Lee Compton, Sergeant of the Guard, said, “Throw some of the niggers to the alligators, blame it on them, hang a bunch of ’em. They was in on it too, you know they was.”
    Blitch leaned back, rubbing a sharp pain over his left eye with his fingers, sliding his hand over his slicked-back remnant of dark-brown hair, down to his collar.
    “Might take some heat off of us,” Compton continued.
    Blitch slammed his palms on the table, and they all jumped. “It’s the same God damn problem, Lee,” he yelled, his face turning redder by the second. “So what you’re sayin’ is, we should claim we was hoodwinked by a bunch of nigger convicts? Are you out your God damn mind? Jesus, I know your daddy, and he ain’t no fuckin’ idiot...”
    Compton shrank like a worm on a hot rock.
    “We all better just hope to hell Brady an’ the boys turn him up. Fuck Tom Maddox, ain’t even ever killed nobody. I just want John Ashley back here so’s I can chain his ass to a gang and watch him bustin’ rocks sixteen hours a day on bread and water. That son of a bitch set us up, and if we don’t catch him, we’re all fucked.” He snatched the Lemon Hart bottle and turned it up for a count of three.
    The other men looked on, nervous, scared. They knew it; they were fucked.

John, of course, had not in fact helped Maddox beat up Belvedere at all. Tom didn’t need him for that, he was a rawboned Midwestern farmboy, even talked that funny talk, and could beat up an old man on his own just fine.
    John figured Marcus would go along when he realized it was his only shot at not going down himself, and he also intended to keep the promise of a nice retirement gift. Marcus was a good guy, and John had a soft spot for good guys.
    When Gauis had called the rabbit, John had lit out for the tree line north of the field of switchgrass. Maddox would need more time to deal with Belvedere, so John had arranged for his pickup cars to meet them on the road past those trees down towards the place where Tom had struck out. When he reached the tree line he turned east, headed to where Tom would come out if he went straight north from Belvedere to the trees.
    He stepped out on the firebreak road right where the bridge took it over the New River, and Alligator Creek flowed in from the southeast. He was astonished to see Hanford Mobley leaning on the driver’s door of Joe Ashley’s treasured 1913 Peugeot, grinning, a smoke dangling from his wide lips. Hot as it was, he was wearing a long-sleeve button-down, and the type of cloth sport jacket that he favored. They made a guy look a little fashionable, without sweating too terrible much.

John ran up and hugged him

    John ran up and hugged him, spun him around.
    Ed and Frank got out, and Tom Middleton and Shorty Lynn got out from another car, the Daimler Prince Henry that Hanford had been driving when they robbed the Stuart Bank.
    “How the fuck,” John laughed, “did you ever talk Joe into letting you drive his car?”
    Frank and Ed were slapping John on the back, laughing, and Hanford said “Oh hell, he’s got him a nice new ride. One a’ them Isotta-Fraschinis like Rudi Valentino got, ya know? We’ve had some good luck lately!”
    John did know, and the money from that luck had not only greased his way comfortably through the prison system but provided him the way out of it as well.
    John looked over at Tom Middleton and Shorty, said “Where’s Lowe?”
    Shorty was sweating.
    Tom smiled his dark, evil smile. “He’s ’gator shit by now. He fucked up, got Bob killed, an’ since he shot you an all, we thought it was the best thing to do.”
    Shorty pulled at his tight collar with a finger. “That wasn’t our fault! Jesus! Bob didn’t wait, see? We said seven, and he just went in ahead of time and started banging away. Didn’t look like he even tried to use the getaway car, he just ran down the street shooting.”
    John was looking up into the trees, his hands grasping bunches of his hair, “Ah, God damn it.”
    Just then Tom Maddox stepped out a dozen yards down the road. They had planned it just right. The gang knew who Maddox was, so nobody threw down on him, but they did eye him warily.
    “Don’t worry, he’s solid. One of us now.
    “Tom, these are my brothers, Ed and Frank, my nephew Hanford, and some friends, Tom and Shorty. But God damn it, Clarence,” and Middleton bristled; he hated the name Clarence.
    “Shorty’s right. Dead on seven PM they blew up a gas tank northwest of the jail a mile or two, which would’a brought every cop in Miami there if Bob had only waited fifteen God damn minutes. And Bob,” he turned to Shorty, “didn’t know how to start the fucking car you left him, it wasn’t a Ford and Bob could barely start one of those. Bob couldn’t find his own ass with two hands, comes to cars. And you,” he practically shouted at Hanford, finger in his face now, “oughtta had God damn well known it!”

But the biggest knucklehead was Bob

    He turned to Middleton, who glared right back. “If I wanted him killed fer shootin’ me in the eye, I’d a’ killed him myself! You knuckleheads killed him for no reason.” He swung around, raised a hand as if to God above, “but the biggest knucklehead was Bob. God damn it…”
    The killing was beginning to wear on John Ashley. Far to the south, a bloodhound bayed, his call like a hunter’s horn. It was instantly joined by others, barking and yelping, begging to be let loose to run. The scent of the escapees was on the wind, in the noses of those hounds. They were coming.
    Tom Maddox spoke for the first time. “Ah, maybe we oughtta leave this family stuff fer later, eh? And get the heck outta here, ya know?”
    They all looked sideways at him for a second, then Middleton nodded. “Maybe so.”
    They jumped in the cars, John behind Ed on the passenger side of the Peugeot. The car had right-hand drive and he couldn’t see out the right-side rear window anymore, and besides, it was bad luck. Just look at his eye.
    He thought about Kid Lowe; he was a fuck up, but still dead for no reason. He thought of his brother Bob, shot down in a dusty Miami street, never coming a country mile from his goal of breaking John out, the big, dumb, loyal slab of bacon. A tear came to his remaining eye, and he had the disturbing sensation that only those who have lost an eye ever feel: crying with no eyeball. God damn it…

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens