Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (81) A historical fiction

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

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
February 17, 1924,
2:35 PM

The three boats plowed into West End Harbor, having skirted Indian Cay and the shoals off West End Town. They’d just made it, cutting north of the main peninsula and riding the swells back southwest until they were in the shelter of the northern arm of the bay.
    Most of the distilleries for local rum and distribution warehouses for British spirits were east of the town itself, inside the bay where ships could land and launch safely. That was also where their offices were, where they kept their money, and the dock the express boat to Nassau was always tied to. The dock was empty.
    In the sudden stillness, out of the wind and crashing waves, in the second boat Hanford Mobley could hear John cussing, and Middleton joined in.

“What the hell?”

    “What the hell?” Mobley yelled, surprised at how loud his own voice was. “John said three o’clock!”
    Clarence Middleton looked at him like he would a dog that had shit the floor. “Three o’clock is when the express leaves for Nassau, not when it gets to West End, ya stupid son of a bitch. It oughta been here at one, to pick up all that money. We’re late.”
    He shut down to idle speed as the other boats did, wondering what John would decide to do.
    What he did first was spin his right hand around a few times and point to his boat. Come in where we can talk.
    They gathered the boats warily. These were substantial vessels and a collision, even at very low speed, could be a disaster.
    John didn’t stop cussing until they were close enough to hear him yell. “God damn it, they were early! Why? They’re never early! God damn it!”
    Tom Maddox yelled back. “Well, I worked on an iron freighter in the Great Lakes, don’t’cha know. If we’d a’known a blow like this was coming, we’d a’ tried to get in early for sure.”
    John was pounding the wheel, nodding his head, shaking it, cursing, stomping. “I know it, God damn it, I know it!”
    Tom Maddox didn’t seem the least intimidated. “At least let’s go make sure!” He jammed the throttle forward and his boat sped toward the dock.
    Ashley and Middleton followed, John passing Maddox and taking the lead.
    Dock workers, assuming they were there to purchase liquor, walked out on the dock and waved them to the loading slips farther east.
    John didn’t even slow down. He slid the Chris Craft beside the long dock; the express was a big boat. He shut down just in time to slide a few feet of bow onto the sandy shore.

Middleton, Hanford and Maddox jumped up

    He grabbed a Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun with the one-hundred-round drum magazine and leapt up on the dock boards. Behind him, Middleton, Hanford and Maddox jumped up, Middleton with his .30 caliber Browning Automatic Rifle and the other two hefting Thompsons like John.
    Miller stayed behind to guard the boats, and Laura Upthegrove was supposed to, but she didn’t. She clambered up on the dock in her flowered dress, her .38 Colt revolver in a holster on her right hip, and pounded after John and the other boys.
    The dockers had turned and run to the office at the sight of John and his gun, but he crashed the wood and glass door open with a boot, firing a half-dozen deafening rounds into the ceiling.
    Everyone there dove to the floor screaming. They were mostly banker types, he thought, or maybe accountants.
    “Where’s the money?” he roared.
    Laura stood pointing her .38 around, as if she had no idea who to shoot.
    The rest of the gang slammed into the office, guns pointing everywhere.
    The bankers were all shaking their heads, and John instinctively went through into the back office.
    Sure enough, he found the manager hiding under his desk. He thought, what was it with these guys? We rob them blind, get away every time, and they think we’re stupid or something. You’d think one of them might try hiding in a closet.

“WHERE’S THE MONEY?”

    He dragged the spindly fellow out of his kneehole by the ear like an angry nanny. “WHERE’S THE MONEY?”
    The man shook in his tiny boots. He couldn’t have been more than five foot three, and John could see another nasty episode about to happen.
    He put the Thompson’s hot barrel to the man’s head and said, “If you piss your pants, I swear to God I will blow your brains out!”
    The man looked like he was sucking up dog vomit, but he didn’t piss. He tried, John had to give him that.
    “You are robbing the Bank of England! They will hunt you down like a dog, you must know that!”
    John fired another half-dozen .45 caliber bullets through the back window, blasting broken glass and wood framing into the street behind. Across that street the warehouses began. The manager shrank, if that was possible, even more.
    John Ashley then pressed the barrel hard against the manager’s cheek and caught a hint of burnt flesh while the man cried out like a beaten child. When he saw a corresponding dime-sized red ring on the manager’s face, he grinned. “Where is the God damned money?”
    “The-the-the express boat was early! They left an hour ago to beat the storm!”
    John rattled the little man by his collar like a terrier with a rat. “How much?”
    The man was shaking his head, frantic. “We only have about eight thousand here, but it’s yours! Take it!”
    John shook him again, harder. “No, God damn it! How much was on that boat?”
    The manager looked off for a second, terrified but calculating. “Gordon’s, Lemon Hart, Bahama Rum Company…maybe two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand?”
    Laura Upthegrove stepped up, cocked her .38 Colt and stuck that in the terrified man’s face too. “I say shoot his lying ass right now.”
    Tom Middleton thought he was going to shit his pants. “Mother fucker! A quarter-million?”
    He turned on John with a poison stare. “We lost a quarter-million because this bitch has a stranglehold on your dick?”
    John dropped the manager, who slumped to the floor, and looked at Middleton, his face a blank mask. He pulled his .357, cocking it in one smooth motion, and stuck the barrel right to the big man’s forehead.
    Middleton didn’t move, glaring right back in John’s passive gaze.

“Say that again”

    “Say that again.”
    Middleton still didn’t move, but he didn’t say anything, either.
    Laura kept her gaze and her gun on the diminutive manager.
    Tom Maddox broke the silence. “Ah, John, you said we got about a half hour before cops could get here from Freeport, din’cha? I reckon we got about twenty minutes left ya know…”
    The two men stared at each other for another minute, then John nodded. He looked down at the little man cowering on the floor. “Get us the money you have.”
    Tom Maddox helped the manager up and politely brushed him off. “Go on an’ get that money now, there ya go.”
    He scrambled to the safe in the hall.
    John went out the back door and looked around. Warehouses, distillery towers, and old brick cooking ovens the size of houses stood close, in rows. The ovens had been converted from coal to fuel oil, and the old scuttles had been bricked up. “God damn it.”
    Middleton came up behind him and said, “No way we’re catching that fuckin’ boat,” like nothing had happened between them.
    John was shaking his head. “Nope.”
    They stood for another minute. “So, what now?”
    John looked around. “We fuck this place up, that’s what. We have to show these bastards they can’t screw us, sell us water for God’s sake.”
    He went back inside, where Maddox had secured what little money there was, remembering the pipe on the manager’s desk. He found a box of kitchen matches and said, “Come on, boys, we’re gonna have us a barbeque.”
    Just to the left of the back door of the office building was a warehouse full of bottled rum. John walked up to the big loading doors and let loose with the Thompson, just a dozen shots or so. He then struck a match and tossed it in the door.
    A dull thud came from inside, and flame began to lick across the floor.

“All of them, boys! Burn ’em!”

    “All of them, boys! Burn ’em!”
    They all grabbed matches and set off running, shooting into warehouses full of bottles, barrels, and distilling vats, tossing matches and running on.
    John and Laura stood and watched, smiling, as though unruly children were misbehaving, but could be forgiven a little harmless fun.
    When Teddy Miller got blown right out of a doorway, John figured they’d done enough. The first row of buildings was now a massive wall of fire, driving them back with its heat. The wind was out of the north, at their backs, driving the flames against the next row of buildings. Nothing separated them but a weed-grown alley a few feet wide, and when the liquor bottles began exploding, he knew the whole place would go.
    Teddy Miller ran up, a huge grin on his scalded face. His eyebrows were gone, and his pathetic excuse for a teenage moustache was nearly fried off. Blisters were forming on his forehead. “Waaa-hooo! God damn, I ain’t had so much fun since the pigs ate my little sister!”
    John wasn’t sure if he was joking or not; the Millers were a rough lot. He had to holler to be heard over the flames. “Reckon we best git goin’.”

Before the sun rose again on America, in London the Morning Post and the Daily Herald ran competing headlines:

“American Pirates Attack Bahamas!”
“American Brigands Destroy Bahama Distilleries!”

The attack was being reported as the first pirate raid on a Crown Colony in over one hundred years.

Confronted by the Devil Himself

    The diminutive manager of the Bahama Rum Producers and Distributors, Ltd., stated in an interview with the Nassau Guardian that, when attacked by John Ashley, he was certain he had been confronted by the Devil Himself. He bragged about having personally seen that the express boat had left early, as if he’d had prior knowledge, and thought himself the savior of the day.
    Not to be outdone by the London papers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Tampa Tribune, ran repeating stories of the daring raid that had barely missed netting a fortune for Florida’s most notorious outlaw.
    The reputation of the Ashleys soared around Stuart, but elsewhere the feeling was that they had gone too far. They had involved England, America’s allies in the Great War, who had sent warships to catch them. Worse, John Ashley had run rings around them.
    The pride of Britain steamed up and down trying to blockade Florida, a state with an eastern coastline over four hundred miles long, with three ships.
    Nine days after the arrival of the Royal Navy, John, Tom Middleton and Hanford Mobley slipped into Freeport and robbed the Bank of England of nearly fifty thousand dollars, getting away in the Lucky Lady without a shot being fired.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens