Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (73) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Monday,
October 17, 1921,
1:00 PM

Frank had been at the engine behind the cargo hold for over three hours, and it was hot. Fucking hot. Ed, the little pussy, was upstairs nursing his busted arm and a bottle of Gordon’s Gin. Little pussy.
    Up there in the cool breeze suckin’ cool gin, while Frank bent wrenches and busted his knuckles over the carburetor on the Sterling with the sun sitting right on his God damn head.
    Ed said he couldn’t get down the ladder, but he could bend a wrench good as anybody and ought’a had got his ass down there to at least help. Said somebody had to keep a lookout. Shit. Lookout for what? The coast of Florida gonna come smack ’em upside the head? Hadn’t moved last time he’d looked.
    “Frank?” Ed said from up top, kinda nervous-like.
    Speak of the fuckin’ devil, Frank thought, shaking his head. “Whut?”

“Whut?” “We got company”

    “We got company,” Ed replied. His voice had hardened; Ed wasn’t a complete pussy. “Git up here. I cain’t get the BAR’s by myself.”
    Frank irritably flipped the three-eighths wrench he’d been using on the float-bowl of the carb clattering back into the tool tray. “Sumbitch,” he said to himself, shaking his head again. He hated it when Ed was right. With his arm broke, even the smaller-version 30.06 caliber machine guns were too heavy for Ed to lift alone.
    The October wind was still from the north, and it sure was a sight cooler on deck. Ed peered into the distance off the port side, training a pair of Zeiss marine binoculars towards shore. The wind was still from the north here in the calm water near the coast, and the Horny B.’s bow naturally faced into it.
    “Two boats, motor cruisers. Cain’t make ’em out yet…that one on the left there, though, that might be Bo Stokes…”
    Frank spit over the side, wiping the cooling sweat from his face with an oily rag. “Ah, shit.”
    Ed turned, still holding the glasses up. Dumbass, Frank thought. “Whut? Them guys work for us.”
    Frank spit again. “That maniac Middleton killed Bo Stokes’ cousin couple months ago. Hijacked a sloop full of Pusser’s Gin from Grand Bahama run by the Rice gang, then shot it up. With the crew inside, the murderin’ bastard. Claims he didn’t know Albert Stokes was on her. ’At’s bullshit, he didn’t give a fuck. I think he likes killin’. ’Sides, everbody knows Albert was a little Nancy-boy, an’ you know how Tom hates homos. ’At’s why he was working for the Rice boys, ’cause Clarence wouldn’t let him work for us.”
    “You think they know’d it ’as him? He said nobody’d know who it was.”
    Frank looked at his little brother, bent his first finger and stuck the knuckle up to his nose like the finger was buried up in his skull. “Ner!”
    It was an old joke between brothers, but Frank was such an asshole, Ed hated it.
    “You never heerd of a radio, ya dumbass? They been puttin’ em in boats for like, a hunnerd years. Fuckin’ dumbass, if we had power we’d have one right now and we could call for some God damn help! The Cap’n a’ that sloop, the Wendy Jean, was Joe Price, good as any ’n’ better’n most, and his engine wasn’t busted, nor his batteries swamped, like us, so yer God damn right he called in an’ said Clarence, Tom ‘Stinky’ Middleton, was a’fuckin’ killin’ ’em, God damn it!”

They’d all called Clarence “Stinky” when they was kids

    At that Ed had to laugh. They’d all called Clarence “Stinky” when they was kids, because he was, well, stinky. He’d smelled like sweat, shit and swamp water, and tell the truth and shame the Devil, the fucker still did. Middleton had hated when they called him that, especially when his cousin Skeeter did. The rest of ’em had always had to run from Clarence, but not Skeeter. Skeeter was as big as Clarence and not afraid of nobody, never, especially his younger cousin, “Stinky” Middleton.
    “Oh hell, and Bo took that mulatto gal with the big titties off him at the July Fourth barbeque out t’ Doc Summerlin’s place in Gomez, remember? Oh yeah, he was pissed.”
    Frank strode to the port rail right aft, and pulled out the machine gun from that side out of a section of false hull. He set the swing-pin into the socket on the back corner of the transom, in a modified fishing-pole holder. He jammed a forty-round, curved, anti-aircraft magazine into it, and swung it around to point west, towards the approaching boats.
    “They’re ’scoping us,” Ed said, but he seemed less nervous now. “Looks like Alton Davis and Jim White. They’s just motorin’ up easy, don’t look like no problems.”
    Frank hustled over to the starboard gunwale and wasted no time in setting up the other gun. “‘Don’t look like no problems’ and ‘ain’t no problems’ ain’t the same thing, spider-boy,” Frank said nastily, and didn’t see Ed give him two middle fingers behind his back, with the balls on either side for extra.
    In another, tense time, maybe twenty minutes, the other boats were pulling up near the Horny B. Frank sat on the transom by the port gun, smoking a cigarette. Ed sat on the starboard rail, just ahead of his Browning, also with the forty-round curved mag in it, and although he didn’t smoke, puffed on one anyway.
    Frank said it would make the right impression. What impression? That he smoked? Frank said they’d look relaxed. Bull-shit; Ed was jumpier than a whore at a wedding.
    Jim White called out first, from the side of the Angelica.

    She was a Stephens Cruiser, maybe ten feet shorter than the Horny B., at about fifty-eight feet. A low cabin occupied most of the rear half of the deck, sunk into the boat, and another forward cabin the front quarter, with what amounted to a raised bridge in between, and a rear veranda under a canvas roof. It looked like a damn tourist boat, Frank thought with disgust, not that the Angelica and the Lorelei hadn’t hauled their share of contraband in their time under just that disguise. It was the trio of rumrunner’s whole idea to look like tourist boats, which for Frank and Ed Ashley was just a concept beyond their imagining. Still, those dining and sleeping cabins carried just as much liquor as the hold of the Honoria Bertrand.
    “Kinda un-neighborly, ain’t it Frank? What the fuck y’all doing, anyway?”
    Frank looked up like he’d just seen them appear from nowhere. He held his hand to block the sun, which was rising behind him, and not in his eyes. “That you, Jimmy? Must be Alton there with ya, hey?”
    Davis lifted a lazy hand; Davis’ hands were always lazy, Frank knew. That didn’t mean nothin’. Alton was Jimmy’s cousin, once removed, on his momma’s side, but he was more like an uncle with their difference in age.
    “We’s just takin’ a break from a little engine work. What’s un-neighborly, Jimmy?”
    Jim White smiled a smile not unlike that of a shark, and spit what looked like tobacco chaw over the side of the cruiser. “I done tol’ you not to call me Jimmy no more, Frank Ashley, and I’ll thank you not to forget it again. I hate that. My name is Jim White.”
    Aw shit, Frank thought again, and he saw Ed stir, tossing his fake smoke over the side. Jim’s anger did mean somethin’, and they both knew what it was. They wasn’t, it turned out, quite out the shit. Not yet.

Frank swung the 30.06 caliber BAR around

    Frank swung the 30.06 caliber BAR around at White and Davis and snarled across the water as they cowered back. “I asked you what the fuck was un-neighborly, you whore-mongrel motherfucker!”
    Ed was on the other gun now, and the open deck of the Horny B. allowed for him to cover the other boat, Anson “Bo” Stokes’ Lorelei.
    “Pointin’ them fuckin’ machine guns at us, is what, you son of a bitch! An’ don’t you talk about my Ma!”
    There had been no sign of Stokes, but Ed hadn’t considered that yet. The shock of his broken arm and the 151 Proof Demerara for breakfast had taken its toll on his caution. He had the gun pointed at Stokes’ boat, but he was watching Davis and White. He figured Davis was OK, but that White made him nervous; plainly the boy was gettin’ too big fer his britches. And where was that bastard, Anson Stokes, anyway?
    “Hey Bo, you sumbitch, where you at?” Ed called.
    Just then Stokes, in his union suit and with his overhauls tied at the waist by the straps, popped up with a Thompson .45 submachine gun. The round drum magazine carried one hundred rounds of finger-thick slugs identical to those of the 1911 Colt .45 ACP pistol. Slugs that, due to a slow muzzle velocity, hit like a subsonic baseball bat.
    “I thought you’d never ask,” Stokes yelled, and opened fire on Ed, the heavy bullets chopping into him, blood flying as he spun and went over the side.
    Frank was turning the port Browning to his left, towards Stokes’ boat, and just had time to yank the trigger when Jim White pulled a Thompson like Stokes’ and shot him a dozen times, cutting him down in an instant. One 30.06 round from Frank’s gun pinged off the bow of the Lorelei, and the sea was quiet again.
    “All right then!” Stokes called. “Get the .50’s and sink their sorry Ashley asses! And don’t shoot at the hold, if the booze blows we’ll get fried! Motherfuckers, kill my cousin Albert, huh? Ya like apples? How’ya like them apples?”
    Frank was out of sight below the gunwale of the Horny B., dead, bleeding into the scuppers, but Ed had floated out from the far side, face down. Dead.

White turned the fearsome .50 caliber on Ed’s body

    Davis and White socketed two .50 caliber Brownings into the rear fishing pole holders, which, like the ones on the Ashleys’ craft, had been modified to hold a gun upright rather than a pole leaned back for trolling. White turned the fearsome .50 caliber on Ed’s body. A single round from this weapon could, and did, take a man’s head off, and scatter it to the fishes. He fired wildly, from sheer spite, against the Ashleys, their high-handed ways, and the money they’d extorted from him and his partners in the last few years. He let out his rage as Ed’s torso sank, only pieces of a man left where he’d been.
    This was more than just business. Albert Stokes and Jim White had been close. Very close. Albert was the only man Jim had ever met who was like him, or that would admit it. Albert’s cousin Bo knew about them, but he loved Albert like a brother and didn’t care. He also never made fun or said the horrible things people normally would about men like them. Jim and Albert were in love, and those God damned Ashleys had killed him.
    Tears streamed down his face as he kept chopping and hacking at Ed, or what was left of him, with the machine gun. Finally, Davis yelled something about ammunition growing on trees, something like his Daddy would have said, and it calmed him a bit.
    Davis opened up on the Honoria Bertrand and Jim joined in, the thumb-thick supersonic slugs of the machine guns tearing the boat to burning detritus. Before they were done, she was a blazing, sinking wreck. The rum in her hold burned fiercely until she went down by the bow, in two thousand feet of water, some twenty-five miles off-shore from the Saint Lucie Inlet in Stuart, Florida.
    The sinking of the Honoria B., with Ed and Frank Ashley aboard, was an act that would send out repercussions like ripples in a pond, from a thrown pebble. Or like waves from a plummeting boulder.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens