Vengeance(36)

Goat and Johnny Lee found Carrie Love in her apartment, and between sobs, she confirmed his suspicions. In other parts of the country, every time people had come to help the miners, the mine owners had busted them up, shipped them out, or killed them. Carrie was a teacher but she was an activist first. She’d been asked to come down and help organize the miners, but she was told she had to be careful. Only a few knew of Carrie Love’s role. Luther was tasked with carrying messages between Carrie Love and the striking miners. Luther took and delivered messages with the jars of moonshine. Someone had leaked word that Luther was doing more than striking, and Carrie figured the mine owners thought Luther was pulling the strings, that he was the one calling the shots. No one suspected the hippie teacher was the mastermind.

Nip the union   organizing in the bud.

Everyone knew Luther was helping his dad make moonshine, so it wouldn’t take much for Aaron Grubbs to find the moonshine still. Then he and some hired thugs slipped up that mountain. Goat had spotted Grubbs’s tan sheriff’s uniform as they were making their way up to kill Luther and anyone else at the still.

The steps outside creaked. Carrie Love’s apartment was on the third floor of the building, and it was the only apartment that was serviced by a rickety staircase running on the outside of the house.

The killers were here.

Goat took a swallow of the moonshine, the whiskey cool on the way down his throat but burning once it hit his stomach.

Damn, Luther’s daddy did make good liquor, he thought.

Before sending Carrie Love away with John Lee Pettimore in the GTO, Goat had had her make a call to Chief Deputy Grubbs. She told him she knew he had killed Luther. She told him she was scared, and she would give him all the paperwork she had on the miners and the organizers. She offered to trade the information for safe passage out of Bell County. Grubbs promised he’d let her leave once he had the papers.

The doorknob turned slightly as a hand tested the lock.

Then the hand knocked.

“Carrie,” Aaron Grubbs said.

Goat glanced at the green square propped against the door. Wires led back to the plastic square in his hand. He pushed back from the table and stood, making sure to be loud. The killers outside would think Carrie Love was coming to answer the door.

Goat stepped behind the refrigerator and pulled the revolver from his waistband. With his other hand, he readied the mine’s trigger.

Goat called out, “Grubbs, I’m going to kill you.” Outside there were confused voices. Goat pushed the mine’s trigger. Clack-clack.

The claymore had a warning on it: front toward the enemy. The warning was there for a reason.

The claymore was a shaped charge of C-4 packed with hundreds of steel ball bearings, and they blew out in a scythe-like arc of destruction.

The explosion shook the whole house.

The apartment’s front door was blown out and clouds swirled inside. His ears ringing, Goat moved forward, kicking through the remnants of the front door. Outside, part of the landing was shredded. Below, in the alley, two bodies still clutching shotguns were splayed out on the roof of Aaron Grubbs’s cruiser. Partway down the stairs was a body, the man’s chest pulped by the claymore’s ball bearings. A broken Thompson submachine gun was on the step below the dead man.

The blast had knocked Chief Deputy Aaron Grubbs down the stairs, where he knelt as if praying. His face bloody, his body listing to and fro like a bobbing ship.

Goat cocked the Colt.

Grubbs looked up and saw Goat. Tried to stagger to his feet, but stumbled and fell.

With the comforting weight of the Colt in his hand, Goat McKnight started down the stairs.





RIVER SECRET

BY ANNE SWARDSON


She took one tiny step toward me. Another — then hesitated. Her mother leaned down and murmured a few words in her ear. Reassured, the girl toddled forward more confidently and then, halfway to where I was playing, stopped again.

She wore a white wool coat that reached almost to her knees. A few strands of curly brown hair escaped from the fur around her hood, which had been carefully tied at the neck. By her sleek-haired mother, probably. Those dimpled hands were too little to tie anything.

Fortunately for me, they could hold a two-euro coin.

The child looked at her mother again. It was time to reel her in. I ended “Sous le Ciel de Paris” a verse early — kids never went for the melancholy material — and put the accordion down on its stand with a click. The girl turned her eyes back to me. I transitioned into 2/4 rhythm with the foot pedal on the bass drum. After picking up the trombone, I launched into the “Bayrische Polka,” keeping the oompah with the drum, adding a cymbal stroke to each downbeat with my other foot, and bobbing forward each time the slide came out with a wailing mwaa-mwaa.