Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (80) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
February 10, 1924,
2:00 PM

“Water,” John Ashley said in disgust. “Those sons of bitches sold us water. And for top prices.” He dumped part of the bottle marked “Gordons London Dry Gin” into the brown waters of the South Fork of the Saint Lucie River. He tossed the remainder, bottle and all, and it sank with a tiny splash.
    Hanford Mobley, Tom Maddox and Teddy Miller all looked down in shame. John thought Teddy, hands in pockets, might actually scuff his shoe on the weathered, uneven dock boards. He was the nephew of Tom Miller, the grocer back in Gomez.
    John glared at Tom Middleton, who glared right back. “You set us up with those bastards on West End. You should have seen this coming. I told you there was a reason they were so cheap at first. They been planning on clippin’ us since they heard the Rice boys sunk Frank and Ed.”
    Middleton stepped up and answered, surly as ever. “I took a few samples, just like always. No God damn way anybody could check all them fuckin’ bottles.”
    John nodded, looking away. “Don’t get your union suit in a twist, Clarence.”

The other boys tried not to laugh

    The other boys tried not to laugh; Middleton was one mean son of a bitch if anybody dared make fun of him. He’d once broken a man’s jaw who said his whore didn’t like Tom’s attentions.
    No one fucked with Middleton except, of course, John; John could do no wrong. “Nobody could have stopped them fucking us, you’re right about that. I don’t blame you. Any of you.”
    This clearly calmed some of the fears of Maddox, Mobley and Miller, but it didn’t settle Middleton’s bile much.
    “And just what the fuck you suggest we do about it?”
    John smiled that smile of his, and Clarence “Tom” Middleton smiled back. A rattlesnake smiling at a shark. One devious and individually deadly; one a force of nature, a tidal wave, a hurricane. Ready to destroy anything and everything in its path.
    “Why, Clarence, I thought you’d never ask. We’re going to teach them a lesson. You don’t never, ever fuck with the Ashleys.”
    Tom bowed up again. “What about the Middletons?”
    John smiled again. “Them either. Hitch up the mules, boys. We’re gonna to fuck them up.”
    Tom settled a little, nodding. “Well all right then.”
    The men set about loading the boats with guns, ammunition, food and some liquor. If the raid went well, they’d have plenty of liquor later.
    Tom Middleton took John aside. “After we do this job, I want to deal with these Dedge boys once and for all. That sumbitch Red Dedge shot me in the ass when they burned out the Frankenfields. He killed a bunch of my guys at Harlan’s, had some kind of sharpshooter with him, I do’ know who but I want his ass too. No way that fuckin’ kid shot like that. I know he’s runnin’ a still not far from the fish camp, or that gimp brother of his is, and cuttin’ cypress for Skeeter Willis. I just can’t figger where it is. You cain’t swing a dead cat around Jackass Junction without hittin’ one of Skeeter’s kids and won’t nobody rat on him to nobody. I want their asses dead, God damn it, and to do that I gotta find ’em.”

John tried not to smile

    John tried not to smile at the image of Tom Middleton beating feet through the mangroves, catching a bullet in the ass from a kid maybe nineteen years old. But he was right. The Dedges had fucked with the Ashleys, and they had to learn, like anyone else, you never, ever fucked with the Ashleys. Just ask Bo Stokes. Ask Jim White and Alton Davis.

Sunday, February 17, 1924, 6:00 AM

“God damn it, they know we’re coming!” Laura yelled. She didn’t have to holler to be heard over the noise of the boat; it was just how she was. Loud. Laura had been booked and released, and since no one could say for sure who had been firing the machine gun back in Gomez and she wasn’t talking, the charges were dropped. That, and she was a woman. Men didn’t like the idea of locking women up, didn’t even like the idea of women doing anything to get locked up, so here she was.
    The mangroves lining the east side of the Indian River sped by, a solid green wall twenty feet high. The wakes of the passing boats washed up into them and disappeared into the dappled green shadows where great blue herons speared fish in the shallows with their six-inch beaks and the pelicans sat up top, ungainly as giant bats until they spread their wings, shitting white streaks down the foliage that splattered the leaves all the way to the water.
    John had changed out the type of boat they used, partly to confuse the water cops, and partly because the Stoningtons had turned out, in his opinion, to be so unlucky.
    Smarts, planning, reputation, it all counted, but you could never discount Lady Luck. So, when he and Handsome had stolen a thirty-five-foot Chris Craft Sea Skiff from a Miami mansion on a tip from Geneva, John felt like they had turned a corner, were somehow on the backstretch with a half-length lead. So, this boat, renamed the Lucky Lady, would lead every man the Ashley gang could gather on short notice to teach the West Enders a lesson they would never forget.
    Behind them, Tom Middleton and Hanford Mobley drove another Chris Craft Sea Skiff named the Sweet Sue, Tom so close John thought he was going to ram him in the ass. Idiot. Always showing off.
    Behind them, Tom Maddox, and Teddy Miller, youngest son of the folks who owned Miller’s general store in Gomez, brought up the rear. Teddy, with Maddox in a Stephens Motor Yacht with the latest gasoline engine from the Samson Iron Works in Stockton, California, was there because no amount of cajoling, threats, or promises would ever convince “Shorty” Lynn to get on a boat.
    This boat was a famous 1912 speedboat named the Fred F. Lambourn, from a design originally used to transport produce and merchants quickly to and from the islands in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River delta. It had been bought by a Palm Beach rumrunner and speakeasy owner named Cap Knight. His Club Unique was built on a dredging barge he and his partner, Albert Hasis, had intentionally beached. The barge was sinking anyway, so they’d had little to lose.

It was  true, John  thought

    It was true, John thought. Bobby Baker would be waiting for them. Despite the stories spread to and by the clan to mask Geneva Pitt’s involvement, Laura hadn’t really planned any of the robberies. Nobody knew about Geneva except Joe and John, and, John thought, probably his mother Lugenia. Joe had loved his wife, so much it had made John proud, and she had to know her husband and the socialite had been an item back in the day. It was the talk of the town at the time: rich girl goes slumming.
    And Lugenia was no dummy either; she’d taught John to read at an early age, although her other sons had been less promising. Not a chance in hell Joe would keep it from her. Because if he did and she found out, there was not a chance in hell she would believe he wasn’t cheating on her, and not a chance in hell she would stay.
    Thinking of how that posse had killed his father made him see red, want to break things, but it did no good. Raging didn’t help the sadness, any more than had tearing up his cell when Ed and Frank were killed.
    It wasn’t Laura’s intelligence John was interested in, not that she had much. It was her pussy he couldn’t get enough of. But still, she had that sixth sense. She could smell cops from a mile away. A hundred miles.
    Palm Beach County Sheriff Bobby Baker knew they were going out the Saint Lucie Inlet and would be waiting for them. She said he did, and that was that.

They  needed to  change up

    They needed to change up, and he’d decided to go through Hobe Sound and out at the Jupiter Inlet instead of the Saint Lucie. The problem was, they needed to get to West End before the express boat left for the bank in Nassau at three PM with the week’s takings, and they were being forced to take a serious detour.
    They sped through the Jupiter Narrows, where both Ashley and Middleton knew the treacherous, sandbar-ridden waterway like their own back yard, and Little Tommy Miller, as John thought of him, would just have to keep up. He was, too; John had to give it to him, the boy had balls.

Sunday, February 17, 1924, 9:15 AM

The mouth of the Jupiter Inlet, normally tranquil much of the year, was a churning mass of white water, confused waves battering in from all directions, like blind giants fighting each other for no reason. The sky was bright but overcast, and the brick-red lighthouse passed by on their left, darkened for the day.
    As the boats threaded the narrow, twisting channel and pushed past the shelter of the land, the north wind and waves struck them fast and hard. All three were driven south a mile or more before they got back on course.
    “God damn it,” John said, fighting the swells to keep a heading north of east.
    It was critical. The wind and waves would drive them south, and while they needed to go a few miles that way, with this drift they would wind up in the south Atlantic, many miles past their destination. While in the Gulf stream, that current would compensate, pushing them northward, but that wouldn’t be enough, and it was only part of the trip. They would have to bull their way northeast in order not to go too far south.
    Worse, having had to go out Jupiter, their course was far more easterly than it would have been from the Saint Lucie. This put them nearly crosswise to the wind and the waves, constantly battling to make up leeway. Burning up time and fuel. From the Saint Lucie, some thirty miles farther north, their course would have put them at an angle to the weather, both wind and swells on their port quarter, the left rear. Helping them, John thought bitterly, instead of blocking their progress and beating the crap out of them into the bargain.

Laura was a hard gal, for hard  times

    Laura quickly became seasick. John’d told her it was better for her to be on deck, but she wouldn’t let him see her puke. She hated weakness, especially in herself. She was a hard gal, he thought lovingly. A hard gal for hard times.
    The Lucky Lady bucked like a gator in a snare, rising and plunging on the ten-foot swells. She slewed sideways, corkscrewed, turned tail and tried her damndest to broach.
    He dragged left on the wheel to keep her bow north of east, to prevent just that—the boat turning sideways to the waves. If she did, he knew, they were dead. He chanced a glance back, to see the Sweet Sue and the Fred F. Lambourn, both less than a mile astern.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens