F.B.I. Showdown: A Classic Suspense Novel. Gordon Landsborough
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showing effect. The voices of passion were thickened and slurred, and some of the movements uncertain.
But they got their prisoner tied to the tree, though he began to struggle as if now in panic. It was too late. The little fellow got so excited that he left off tying him and started to beat him about the head, but the rest of the men shouted him off because he kept falling in their way.
Hymie, his back to the last red rays of the sun, kept shooting the scene. No one was watching the back road now.
Frank stood back from the prisoner and then whooshed the gasoline out of his can. It fell in a high arc over the prisoner and the tree trunk, and he kept swinging the can forward and sending further gasoline out over the man.
About the third throw the man started screaming and struggling frantically in his bonds. Hymie, his stomach tightening, guessed that some of the gasoline had gone in his eyes and it was burning.
The screaming seemed to excite the men all the more, and Frank led them in a shouting match against the helpless prisoner.
“Scream, you buzzard—”
“Yeah, listen to yer damn’ croakin’ voice fer the last time—”
“The hell, you bin makin’ a noise all your life, it’s right you should go out makin’ one now!”
They were more than half-drunk and they were baiting their enemy. The fact that he was completely helpless and incapable of protecting himself seemed only to bring out the devil in them. They were without pity at that moment, though many were to waken later and wonder what in hell had made them behave like that.
Then Frank struck a match and threw it forward. It seemed to go out for a second, and in that moment an eddy of night breeze wafted raw gasoline fumes across to where Hymie sat quietly atop the roof of his sedan, operating his camera.
Then there was a sudden, soft-roaring sound and a pillar of red fire leapt into the branches of the old oak tree.
Hymie didn’t stop his camera now, didn’t take it away from that writhing, burning figure that screamed away his last tormented moments on Earth.
And Frank and a few of the ringleaders were close to that pyre, and the red flames lit up their savage, elated faces; and now they did not attempt to disguise the sadism which had actuated them and brought about this tragedy.
The screaming went on, high and awful, Someone shouted, “There ain’t enough gasoline, I reckon,” so Frank stood out for all to see and tossed the part-full can with an underhand throw so that it landed right at the burning man’s feet.
The grass was burning for a square yard or so around, and now more gasoline gurgled out of the can and added to the flames and sent them flaming up around the limbs and body of the writhing, agonised prisoner. Almost immediately after that the screaming stopped and the man stood silent in his bonds and then sagged. And then the bonds burned through and he fell on his face in the burning grass,
Just at that moment the gasoline can blew up, and small gouts of flaming fuel came shooting all around the lynching party. They scattered in alarm, and then, realizing there was no danger, they stopped running and started to laugh loudly to show they hadn’t been seriously scared. It sounded wrong and indecent with that corpse roasting.
Frank started to marshal the party after this; he drove them to their cars and told them to get moving back to town. It seemed they were going to leave the charred body just like that. Someone must have said something on the subject, for Frank immediately turned and with grim humour said, “What the hell, you don’t think the cops are gonna look far when they see who it is, do you? That is, if he can ever be identified. Old Mouthy’s given ’em so much trouble I reckon they’d pin a medal on us if they knew what we’d done.”
Everyone who heard laughed again, and again it held that false, strident note—the note that creeps in when men are out of their depth but are hard at it, trying to kid themselves they’re all right, that nothing’s going to happen to touch them. But Hymie noticed that a lot were pretty quick to get into their cars and drive away. You might have thought that some were suddenly sobering....
Hymie pulled into the column, but he didn’t follow them down the Warren Bridge highway. Where it joined with the Washington Road by the big, new hatchery, he pulled left and headed north through the night. Another car pulled out after him, and it made Hymie sweat because he had just witnessed a murder and this was one of the accomplices driving hard behind. But in time this second car pulled into a farm road, and then Hymie went on through the night alone.
He had changed his mind about staying in Warren Bridge overnight; instead, he would drive to Washington, where he lived, and put up at some hotel if the goshdarned politicians and military hadn’t taken all the beds. He wasn’t expected home until the following day, and he wasn’t going to be with his wife one minute earlier than she was expecting him....
He felt something coming up within him, and he stopped and got out of the car and was sick by the side of the road.
He thought, hell, thinking of his wife on top of what he had just seen was enough to make any man empty his stomach. He drove on and wondered what the boss would say when he came in with that film he’d just shot.
CHAPTER TWO
JAILBREAK
It was in the no-talking period. Johnny Delcros had been using his eyes and again he was speculating. He said, “Get someone out there—a dame, say—she could shine a mirror up into that swine’s face an’ he wouldn’t know where he was shootin’.”
His lips didn’t move. They shuffled round the prison compound, grey, dejected, listless men. The “swine”—the cop with the automatic rifle up top on the wall—shouted, “Sew your lips down there. If I catch the guys that are talking, I’ll roast ’em!”
The noise went on; no one appeared to be talking, but everyone carried on with their conversation. Exercise was a good time to exchange views on a variety of subjects, starting with the prison diet, going through discourses on the characteristics (generally unfavourable) of their warders, and even including speculation on the possibilities of—escape.
A number of men were committed to it. Johnny Delcros, with Egghead Schiller and a man named Joe Guestler, were perhaps the ringleaders. There were about a dozen planning a break, all long-term men with only a part of their sentences completed. Delcros was in for another five years—he had been convicted on five charges of robbery with assault. One of the charges hadn’t been his, and he lived now with a sense of grievance and injustice.
Schiller—he’d never had any hair since the day he was born, but had never quite realized what a handicap it was in his life of crime—Schiller was in on a ten-year rap and had served two only. Guestler was one of the Savannah Gang, and he’d got life for his part in an automobile hold-up in which a girl had been assaulted and her escort killed while trying to stop them getting away. Erd Savannah had been given full penalty, and Guestler was lucky to have got away with life.
Louie Savannah, Erd’s kid brother, Ed Hankman, Jud Corbeta, and one or two other boys were in on the proposed break. Hankman and Corbeta were both part of the old Savannah Gang and were serving fifteen years apiece. Louie, who had only been eighteen at the time of the stick-up, was also in for fifteen.
That length of time all in one place isn’t to be contemplated calmly, so the Savannah Gang had got together to plan a break out. They weren’t getting far when Egghead Schiller and Johnny Delcros were invited to join in the attempt. Egghead was Johnny’s pal, and Johnny knew of a way of getting guns into prison. He wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Egghead, how he did it; but they knew he wasn’t talking tall words, because one day he showed them a Smith & Wesson .38, and a week later he had ammunition for it. Egghead had an idea it was Johnny’s girlfriend who brought the stuff in, and one of the warders was paid not to look when the things were passed. He couldn’t see how else it could be done.
But Johnny had the damnedest ideas for a prison break. His idea was to get enough guns, start shooting and rush the wall, get over, and drop