Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (59) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Tuesday,
April 30, 1918,
6:00 AM

As the sun peeked up to his left, Joe was driving north in his new Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8 with the custom-made light brown body panels, a dark brown stripe running the length of the car level with the bottoms of the windows.

Custom Isotta-Fraschini
luxury sedan

Isotta-Fraschini chassis,
engine and drive train,
circa 1917

    Easter-egg yellow wheel wells curved from over the tires in the front, down in a sweeping arc to become rubber-covered skid-proof running boards, then swooshed back up over the rear wheels. Behind the slope of each front wheel was a stout, highly finished oak box cornered with brass, the left side holding the tools needed to jack up the car and change a tire, the right, the tools to work on a balky engine.
    The tires were enormous whitewalls with complicated chrome wire rims so bright the reflected sunlight offended the eye. Same for the angel-like decoration that stood proud from the top of the grill, the blocky grill itself, gleaming brilliantly; and the double, chrome front bumper bars.
    Ed sat in the passenger seat, dressed as the chauffeur. Once again, Joe was determined no one would drive his new ride unless and until it was absolutely necessary.
    Ed had looked at the angel to see if she had tits; she held some kind of disk overhead in her clasped hands. Ed thought it was stupid. The disk looked like a hubcap. Worse, she hardly had any tits at all.
    The image was intended to portray Icarus, reaching for the Sun, which had been replaced by a wheel, not a hubcap. Ed didn’t know that; his education did not extend to Greek mythology, or Greek anything. He did know the 1917 Tipo 8 had other hood ornament options; one slick one looked like a firebird or a Phoenix or something, one was some other pretty goofy-lookin’ bird with a long neck and red cap on its head, but the slickest, in Ed’s opinion, was the Cobra.
    It was a coiled cobra with the head up, the hood spread, fangs protruding and tongue flicking out. In Ed’s admittedly limited opinion, it sure beat the shit out of an angel with no tits holding a hubcap.
    John Ashley, newly broken out of Raiford State Prison, not fifty miles away from Jacksonville, sat in the back seat. He hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left the family compound in the Everglades.
    Hanford Mobley now drove the Peugeot full time. He’d just picked up Tom Middleton, who left a borrowed Model T on the side of Coastal Highway a hundred yards or so south of Jacksonville. With Middleton in front and Shorty and Maddox in the back, he pulled up on the north side of the curve in the Saint John’s River just south of the junction of Main street, which ran pretty much north and south, and Forsythe, which ran more-or-less east and west.
    Mobley was annoyed; Maddox hadn’t shut up with his goof-ball Midwest banter the whole damn trip up the coast from Gomez, seemed like, and Middleton was in a pissy mood over it.
    The riverbank was a tangle of mangroves and seagrape. Sea-oaks, low, grizzled trees with horizontal limbs like the trunks of other oaks extending outwards for yards, until their weight bore them to the ground. Then the limbs grew up again, thick as the thigh on a cow, and extended farther. Marl-paved fishing and clamming roads criss-crossed the bayou.
    Joe pulled up in the Isotta, with Ed riding shotgun in his chauffeur’s outfit, John in the back. Hanford backed the Peugeot into an unused boat ramp, nearly overgrown with the mangroves.
    They’d scouted the area ahead of time, and made sure it was unused, so no pissed-off fisherman would be inconvenienced and maybe do something stupid, like call the cops. Anyone who saw it might figure someone had parked and gone wading with a fishing pole, although they might wonder why a fisherman would be driving what looked pretty much like a race car.
    While Mobley backed the Peugeot nearly to the waterline, Shorty sweated in the back seat, pulling at his collar with a finger and screwing his head around like he expected a surprise attack.
    “The fuck’s the matter with you, Lynn?” Middleton growled. “Yer nervous as a nigger at a KKK convocation, an’ yer making me nervous too.”

Shorty hated riding with Handsome

    Shorty was indeed nervous; he hated riding with Handsome. He gave him what Shorty considered only a professional courtesy by using his preferred name in the “business,” but Handsome was a fucking madman behind the wheel. A clear danger to the public and, particularly, to Missus Lynn’s boy Shorty.
    Middleton was scarier than a ten-pound Chicago sewer rat, and probably knew all about KKK conventions or whatever the fuck. He’d rather have the cops after him than that homicidal maniac. And the water. Shorty hated the water.
    Maddox started in again, “Maybe we should…” but Middleton cut him off with a finger in his face.
    “Shut. The fuck. Up.”
    Maddox shut.
    Joe pulled up in front and they all got out of the cars.
    Ed went around to take his place at the wheel of the luxury sedan, rubbing his hands together. Despite the angel having no tits and a stupid hubcap, that car drove like a smooth dream. It had a massive straight-eight seven-point-four-liter engine, whatever the hell a liter was, and was capable of doing well over one hundred miles an hour. You could outrun any cop car in America, and not even rattle your nuts while you did it. He treasured the moments Joe allowed him to actually drive it, and now he would get to drive this car during a getaway for the first time. He intended to put her through her paces in short order, once they were done at the bank, before Joe could tell him to pull over and give him the wheel.
    Joe gathered all the other men while Ed rapturously stroked the massive polished-wooden steering wheel, put in the clutch and worked through the three-speed transmission.
    Joe was asking the other boys if they all knew their parts in the plan, and they were nodding. The scheme was they would catch an armored car shipment as it arrived, and hit it outside of the bank before the guards got the money inside. Joe looked over in irritation as Ed revved that big engine. “Okay boys, let’s get going. Ed and I will wait until you’re almost there before we pull up.”
    Dressed in his Dapper Bandit togs, looking every inch the gentleman, Joe would walk towards the bank with a briefcase while Ed waited outside. The boys would follow him, and they would hit the car before they got the money in the doors.
    The bank, at the intersection of Main and Forsyth, was the Barnett National Bank of Jacksonville, founded by none other than Bion and William Barnett, who were also partners in the Sebastian Cattle Company, along with former Governor Francis P. Fleming and son, all great customers of the Ashley bootlegging empire.
    Joe didn’t care; fuck ’em, they were insured. In fact, like that asshole in Okeechobee, they’d probably just get richer. Maybe even famous! That pissed him off; he’d quite enjoyed his notoriety as the Dapper bandit just a few years back. Where the hell did some bank manager who gets robbed get off stealing his limelight?

Geneva had put him onto the heist

    Geneva had put him onto the heist. Seemed that one Henry L’Engle, the Duval County Tax Collector, was angry with Florida Bank, which held the county funds; they were charging his county an outrageous six dollars and twenty-five cents for every fund exchange with New York.
    Bion Barnett saw him one day at Rosenblum’s Haberdashery at Adams and Main, where they both happened to be fitting bespoke suits at the same time. Bion, by now his remaining hair and sharp brush mustache a dignified white, favored the older style of double-breasted suit coats with matching vests, white shirt and striped bow tie, and the requisite gold watch and chain, said chain leading from the fob at his middle vest buttonhole to his left trouser pocket. The double-breasted fit tighter when buttoned, which he liked, and while Bion Barnett was a big man, he was never fat.
    L’Engle, on the other hand, was a heavyset man with a respectable if not excessive belly, and preferred the newer single-breasted suit, no vest, and the latest fashion: the return of the “necktie.”
    Bion Barnett thought they made a man look silly, not dignified, but he didn’t say that. He heard this man complaining to Frank Rosenblum, the founder and proprietor of Rosenblum’s, that Florida Bank, which had a branch right across the street from Rosenblum’s, was charging Duval County for every money transfer to and from their New York City investors.
    He wasn’t sure who the man was, but banker or not, Bion had never enjoyed the pleasure of having Frank Rosenblum himself fit him a suit. He was impressed.
    “Who are you, sir, if I may ask?”

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens