The Archimedes Effect (19 page)

Stack set his drink down and drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t that much; he was maybe five-seven or -eight. He flicked his hand out and hit Billy’s hat, a derby, with a little tap.

“Call me ignorant? That fo’ yo’ hat,” Stack said.

“That right? Well, that for
yo’
hat.” Billy, a bigger man, slapped at Stack’s Stetson, knocking it slightly askew on Stack’s head.

Stack Lee grinned. He straightened his Stetson. Quickly, he reached up and grabbed Billy’s derby, snatched it from his head. He held it in his left hand and with a sudden blow, smashed the crown in with his right, breaking the blocking. He laughed.

“You done broke the form!” Billy said.

“I believe I did.” He tossed the ruined hat onto the bar. “And it’s an improvement, you ax me.”

“You owe me a hat. I want six bits from you!”

“Six bits? Sheeit, you could buy a rack of hats like this fo’ six bits! Ain’t worth a nickel.”

Billy, who might have been passing drunk but not slowed from it, reached out and grabbed Stack’s Stetson and pulled it off. “Well, I reckon we trade, then.”

“Gimme back my hat,” Stack said.

“Nossuh, I ain’t gonna, till you give
me
my six bits!”

“You will give me my hat back, or I will blow out your fuckin’ brains!”

“That’s what you say.”

Jay watched the next part carefully. It was a lesson in escalation of violence—and why drinking and arguing in a bad man’s bar was not a good idea.

Stack pulled a blue-steel Smith & Wesson .44 revolver from his coat pocket and clouted Billy Lyons upside the head with it.

Billy didn’t speak as he bounced off the bar and came back glaring at Stack. He hadn’t been hit that hard, but certainly it was hard enough to both stun and piss him off.

Things got real quiet in the saloon.

“You give me my hat
now,
motherfucker, or I will shoot you!”

Lyons, still holding the hat in his left hand, jammed his right hand into his pocket, where, Jay knew, he had the borrowed knife.

He said, “You cockeyed son of a bitch, I’m gon’ make you kill me!”

There was a general stampede for the door as most of the two dozen patrons decided at that moment they had pressing business elsewhere. Men did pull guns in that part of town frequently and they did go off. That Christmas Day, there would be at least four or five other shootings in bars, poolrooms, and whorehouses within a couple of miles. Some of the shooters weren’t very good at it, and innocent bystanders had been known to collect bullets more than once. Bad enough to be killed for something you did; worse to be killed by a stray bullet by accident. Dead, either way.

Stack took three steps backward and pointed the gun at Billy. Jay stayed where he was.

Stack shot Billy. Just the one time, in the abdomen. The noise was very loud in the saloon, and the gray smoke that belched to join that of the tobacco had that unmistakable gunpowder stink.

Billy Lyons fell back against the bar, lurched to one side, still clutching Stack’s Stetson.

Nobody said anything. The few patrons and bartenders still there stood frozen. Nobody wanted to move and become a target.

Billy sagged against the bar, and dropped the hat. Stack stepped up to him. “I told you. You give me back my hat!” And with that, he bent down, retrieved the Stetson, and put it on.

Lyons slid lower. “You done killed me,” he said.

“You took my hat. It’s on you.”

With that, Stack put his gun away and walked out.

Strolled
out, in no hurry at all.

Billy, Jay knew, would linger on for a time. They would take him to the infirmary, and later to a hospital, where he would pass away at about four in the morning. Not a testament to his intelligence. What kind of man refuses to give a swiped hat back to its owner when staring down the barrel of a gun?

Well, the kind soon to be a dead man . . .

Stack, Jay knew, went to one of his houses—he had a couple—reloaded his .44 and stuck it in a drawer and, apparently unconcerned, went to bed. That was where the local police found both Stack and his gun at about three A.M., an hour or so before Billy Lyons died.

That was the true story of how Stagger Lee shot Billy.

No gambling late, Lyons didn’t win all Stack’s money, and while Lyons did have three children by a local woman, he wasn’t married to her or anybody else, so most of the versions of the songs that came later got it wrong. It was in St. Louis, not Memphis, nor Chicago, nor New Orleans. And how Stack Lee Shelton became any kind of hero after that was a puzzle to Jay. Cold-blooded murder over a hat didn’t seem like the stuff of heroic legend to Jay.

Stack Lee was tried twice for the crime. The first trial ended in a hung jury, with Stack’s white lawyer arguing self-defense, due to the knife in Billy Lyons’s pocket. But the lawyer, an alcoholic, died shortly thereafter following a drinking binge, and Stack’s next attorney apparently wasn’t as good as his first. The second trial, he was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years. After a brief parole, he was incarcerated again, and died in the Missouri State Prison Hospital, on March 11, 1912, of tuberculosis.

One of the most accurate of the songs that came from the Missouri riverboat roustabouts around the end of the nineteenth century had a final verse that Jay liked:

 

Jay watched the bartenders and bystanders haul Billy Lyons out of the club. What had he learned here? Well, not as much as he’d hoped, but at least it had been interesting. And maybe if he ever got tired of working for Net Force, he could go into the entertainment biz. He could tell and show a pretty good story. There was always a market for scenario-builders of his caliber.

Shoot, maybe even
Hollywood
. . .

It had been going so well, Carruth thought. Done and on the way out, and then, out of nowhere, that X-factor appeared, and royally screwed it all up. Some guy with insomnia or having to walk out a cramp or sneak a smoke, whatever, and all of a sudden he’s yelling and lights are coming on. . . .

Carruth had shut him up, but the cure—a round from his BMF revolver—was worse than the disease. He hadn’t thought, he had just pulled the piece and cooked, almost instinctively.

The gun was like a bomb going off, and anybody who was a light sleeper certainly sat up in bed when he heard that honker’s roar.

Now, as their truck careened around an S-curve two miles away from the base, a Hummer full of MPs chasing it, Carruth realized they were in deep trouble. Oh, they might outrun the MPs, but there was such a thing as radio, and when the Army got its act together, they would start calling for help. Yeah, they wanted to take care of their own business, but if Carruth and his men got away, their heads were gonna roll, and that was more important.

A roadblock of state cops sure wasn’t going to be helpful to Carruth’s situation.

Lying in the back of the truck, Stark wheezed around the M-16 round that was probably lodged in one of his lungs. Dexter had slapped a pressure patch on the hole to stop the bubbling, and hit Stark with a syringe of morphine to ease his pain, but his chances weren’t good. Being bumped and thumped around in the back of a truck rolling at eighty down the highway wasn’t helping the wounded man any.

To Hill, Carruth said, “Break one out.”

He was talking about the toys they had just swiped, four M-47 wire-guided, semiautomatic missile launchers, with rockets. Called the Dragon, the M-47, aka the FGM-77, was a portable antivehicle weapon from McDonnell-Douglas consisting of a launcher, missile, and wire-guidance system. Pretty much obsolete and on the books as surplus, having been replaced by the FGM-148 wireless Javelin, there were still a bunch of them in military armories and they still worked just fine. The Dragon was simple to use: Set the crosshairs on the target and squeeze the trigger. As long as you kept the sight steady, that’s where the rocket would hit. Good for twelve, fifteen hundred meters, and able to pierce 400 mm of armor, it was a great tank-buster.

“We can’t shoot it in here, Boss,” Hill said. “The backwash will scour the inside of the truck down to the metal and roast us all.”

True. The old system didn’t have a low-gee, soft-launch motor and wasn’t IR-guided like the newer Javelins, which were fire-and-forget. You could reload one of those instantly from inside a house or truck, you didn’t have to wait and use the guidance wire. “I know that. Get it ready. Drop a couple grenades to back ’em off some and next time we round a curve, we’ll slow it down enough for me to bail out.”

“That’s crazy,” Hill said.

“Better than spending the rest of your life in Leavenworth—or winding up on a slab.”

Hill nodded. He pulled an M-61 fragger, olive green with the yellow stripe up top, yanked the pin, waited a second, and underhanded it out through the rear. The grenade was an antipersonnel weapon, it wasn’t designed to stop vehicles, but it would make a big noise and flash and maybe pepper the chaser with a bit of shrapnel. Slow them down a hair.

The grenade bounced on the road—Carruth saw the spark where it hit the pavement—and shortly thereafter blew up.

The headlights of the Hummer dipped as they hit the brakes.

Stateside Hummers weren’t armored well, if at all. A grenade could punch holes in the sucker and maybe kill a rider. They would know that better than anybody.

“Curve coming up, Boss. We have a couple hundred meters.”

“Slow it down once you are around it. Find me a soft spot!”

Carruth grabbed the Dragon. The package weighed twenty, twenty-two kilos or so. He hoped he wouldn’t drop it, or have it fall apart when he hit the ground.

Hoped
he
wouldn’t fall apart, either.

Hill threw another grenade, this one timed to go off in the air.

The truck slowed. Carruth bailed, hit the ground next to the road, tumbled, rolled, came up, fell again, the wind knocked out of him. Man!

The truck sped up.

Carruth crabbed further away from the road, then dropped prone.

The headlights of the Hummer swept around the curve. The vehicle roared past. A soldier leaned out of the passenger window, aiming his M-16 at the truck ahead of them.

Carruth sat up, lit the electronics, lined the crosshairs of the sight on the rear of the Hummer. It was a hundred yards away. Too close, he didn’t want to be eating shrapnel. . . .

Two hundred yards . . . two-fifty . . .

He squeezed off the round. There was a big
whoosh!
as the rocket’s exhaust blew out behind him. The rocket sped away. Top speed was only a couple hundred meters per second, and it would take a little while to get there, keep the sights on the target, keep them lined up. . . .

The rocket hit the back of the Hummer. The rocket and the Hummer went up together, a terrible flash, and the noise washed over him a second later. . . .

It seemed like a long time before the truck came back to collect him, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. They drove past the burning remains of the Hummer, and the soldiers who had manned it.

“Sorry,” Carruth said as they went by.

“Stark’s dead,” somebody said.

Carruth nodded. “We’ll have to ditch the truck, fast. Get to the exchange point.”

The exchange point was behind an old gas station; there were two pickup trucks waiting. They piled out of the bigger truck, loaded the Dragons into them, covered them with tarps.

Carruth siphoned a couple gallons of gas out of the big truck’s tank and soaked Stark’s body and the inside of the vehicle pretty good. He climbed into one of the pickups, leaned out, and lit a flare. As they drove past the big truck he tossed the flare. There was no ID in the vehicle, nothing to tie Stark to them, and by the time anybody got there, he’d be a crispy critter.

“Go!”

The two smaller trucks peeled out.

The big truck erupted into an orange fireball as the gasoline caught.

“Adios, amigo,” Carruth said. He saluted the outside rearview mirror. At least they gave Stark a Viking funeral, sort of.

The light from the burning truck was visible for a long way behind them as they drove off.

It was a night to burn stuff up, for sure.

Lewis wasn’t gonna be happy about this.

This time, General Hadden had Thorn come to his office. And he wasn’t a man to beat around the bush.

“I’m not happy with your unit’s progress on this, Thorn. Last night, somebody stole four surplus rocket launchers from one of my bases and killed some of my soldiers—we lost six men when they cooked a vehicle full of MPs!”

“I’m sorry. We’ve got the best people in the world working on it as fast as they can go. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“So you say, but I’m not seeing results and I’ve got a body count!”

“With all due respect, sir, we’re not making burgers and fries here. Sometimes you don’t get it your way. We’re dealing with a bad guy who is clever and who doesn’t want to get caught. Our people are on his trail, they are making progress, that’s how it works.”

Hadden said, “There is always something that can make things go faster—the trick is to figure out what. Maybe your computer geeks need some more motivation. Some . . . direct supervision. From what I’m able to tell, you give them something and turn them loose—you aren’t there keeping their noses to the grindstone.”

Thorn shook his head. “Sir, I came to this job by way of the computer industry. I worked with ‘computer geeks’ all the time. Hell, sir, I was one myself. They deal well with time pressure, most of them, but standing over them and micromanaging their actions is worse than trying to herd cats. The best players here are like artists; you lean on them, they will stop what they are doing and cross their arms. This isn’t paint-by-numbers.”