Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman Page B

Hannion, was different. He had come to Detroit at the invitation of relatives after his release from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where he had served nineteen years for the robbery of the Kansas, Texas, and Missouri Railroad in 1905. He had a road-gang complexion, sun-cracked and windburned, and a short cigarette smoldering in a groove in his lip that didn’t move when he spoke, a characteristic of men accustomed to conversing in an environment where silence is enforced.
    “You were a desperado?” I had grown up on a steady diet of Tom Mix and William S. Hart.
    “Not as desperate as the ones that spent so much time chasing me.” His rigid lips flattened his Southwestern drawl further. “There was quiet times.”
    “Quiet as this?”
    He accepted a crate and passed it on. “Work like this here’s the reason I went on the scout in the first place.”
    “So why are you doing it?”
    “Trains run too fast these days.”
    Austin Camarillo—Lon to his fellow bootleggers—proved a disappointing interview. Stationed at the end of the line, the skull-faced former aviator socked crates into the back of a battered black Lincoln hard enough to rattle the bottles inside, wouldn’t discuss his experiences in the war, and responded to questions about his current activities with monosyllabic snarls. So much for what Winchell wrote about the easy sociability of hired killers. I got a rise out of him just once, when I asked him how he came to know Joey Machine.
    There was a lull while another stack was being carried from the depths of the warehouse. Camarillo fished papers and makings out of his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette with a careless ease I would sooner have associated with Hannion, the Oklahoma bandit. He speared it between his meatless lips, struck a match on the seat of his pants, and paused with the flame shimmying an inch from the end of the cigarette.
    “Influenza,” he said, and lit the tobacco.
    “Sorry?”
    He blew smoke through his nostrils and shook out the match. “I came down with the influenza November ninth, nineteen-eighteen. We were short on planes, so somebody else flew my bus. Coming back from patrol the squadron ran into heavy Archie. Archie, that’s anti-aircraft fire. A piece hit the fuel tank and my plane went up like a Catherine wheel with somebody else inside. Two days later I was strong enough to fly, but in the meantime the Kaiser signed the Armistice and I shipped home.”
    “So?”
    “So if it wasn’t for the influenza I wouldn’t have come to know Joey.”
    The line started moving again and he went back to work. I thanked him and walked away.
    Bass Springfield had been spelled early on the loading dock by Andy Kramm, who although he was half the colored man’s size had two functional hands and worked just as fast. Springfield rested his bulk on an upended barrel with his mangled fingers spread on his knees. I wandered over there and leaned my elbows on the dock.
    “Miss baseball a lot?”
    “What you think?” He was watching the operation.
    “Is this the only work you could get?”
    He nodded. “I ain’t any too good at it neither.”
    I asked him, after having asked Kramm, Hannion, and Camarillo, what I had come to think of as The Question.
    “I don’t know Mr. Machine nohow,” he said. “I was hired by Mr. Jack.”
    “Where’d you meet him?”
    “You should’ve seen it.” Jack Dance came over to the edge of the dock, brushing sawdust off the front of his coat. “I was meeting a train at the station on Brush when I hear this banging coming from a freight on the siding, a real racket. The train’s late, so I stroll over there and take a peek inside this boxcar where the noise is coming from. I see this big nigger walloping a white man’s head against the side of the car. This other white man’s laying on his face on the floor and you just got to figure he had the same.
    “Well, it wasn’t none of my business, except I’m a white man too, so