The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (9 page)

After reading the telegram, Darcy hurriedly put on a white-flowered dress and
light sweater and ran down the stairs. Her heart was frantic, and her stomach
was reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Life had
returned, and she needed sustenance. She clasped the telegram in her right
hand, folded in half.
“Excuse me, Miss Windham?”
A voice she did not recognize. You never knew how Jason would contact you, and
she turned to face the man. But he wasn’t there.
She was about to turn again when she felt a hand clamping on her right forearm.
A car had pulled up on her left, by a hydrant. There was another man, and a
hand pushed her head down before she could see his face.
The men were moving toward the car and her feet did their part to keep up. Then
she was in the backseat and someone pushed her head down again, and another set
of hands was riffling through her hair. A tightness was pulled over her head,
stopping at the eyes. Goggles? She felt them sucking at her skull. In front
they were stuffed with dark cloth. Like the blindfold from that other time, but
far less gentlemanly.
“Go!”
someone hissed.
The car was moving when she asked if they were with Jason.
“Keep quiet and everything’ll be fine,” said a voice beside
her.
“She say Jason?” someone asked from the front. “Doesn’t
she know?”
“Know what?” Darcy asked.
Something jabbed her ribs. “You know what this is, doll? Keep talking and
you’ll be as dead as your boyfriend.”
Darcy was very still even as the car took a sharp right. Jason had not sent
these people.
She pressed her palms into each other, the fingers pulling on their
opposites’ knuckles. The world around her was mad but she tried to be its
calm center.
She felt very alone, and she had dropped the telegram.

VI.

W
eston Fireson’s brothers haunted
him long before they were dead. As their adventures had filled newspapers the
previous spring, twice Weston was arrested by police officers exuberant at
their luck—
I nabbed Whit Fireson buying a coffee at the Doughnut Stop!
I caught Jason Fireson myself, walking down Garfield Drive, alone and unarmed!
Twice Weston had guns pointed at him, their barrels lean and sinister. Twice he
had been frisked, shackled, hauled in, and fingerprinted, his pleas ignored. At
least he’d been alone, with no friends or pretty date to see his face go
white and his raised hands shake with fear.
Those two disasters had occurred during errands to Cincinnati and
Dayton—at least the Lincoln City police seemed to know who Weston
was—so he soon concluded that travel outside of town was no longer
advisable, at least not until his brothers were arrested. Or killed.
The haunting had intensified four months before his brothers’ deadly
shootout in Points North.
When Weston showed up at the office that Monday, minutes before his usual eight
o’clock, he was unexpectedly called into his boss’s inner sanctum.
Henrik Douglasson, Esq., occupied a tastefully decorated, not too large office
on a prime corner of the downtown building’s fourth floor. At that hour in
April, the air was cool, yet the wide, east-facing window
baked
a generous swath of ovenlike warmth across half the room. Douglasson motioned
for Weston to take one of the leather chairs, both of which were glowing in the
sunlight.
“How was your weekend?”
“Fine, sir. Helped my mother around her house, mostly. Getting the yard
in shape and fixing the porch.”
“Good, good.” Douglasson was in his late forties, gray-haired,
heavy enough to appear sufficiently well-off but not so slovenly as to scare
away a prospective client. Much of the politically connected real-estate
attorney’s current work involved foreclosures and searching the titles of
vacant or disputed property. Even bad times resulted in windfalls if you were
standing on the right hilltop.
Douglasson’s decades-long assistant had passed away in ’30, a few
months after the conviction of Patrick Fireson and the foreclosure of the last
family store, which Weston and Whit had been desperately trying to keep afloat.
Douglasson had been tangentially involved in Pop’s horribly timed
real-estate gambit, and had met Weston at a few meetings, where he was
impressed by the young man’s quiet perseverance and seriousness. After
Pop’s trial, Douglasson offered Weston a job as a legal assistant, which
Weston happily accepted, as he’d been without work for weeks. Weston saw
the offer as a sign of the man’s decency, whereas Whit took it as a sign
that Douglasson had something to feel guilty about.
How can you work for
him?
Whit had accused his brother.
He’s just another rich man who
helped Pop get into trouble and then didn’t lift a finger once it all
blew up
. But what choice did Weston have? At the time, Jason was still in
jail on his second rum-running conviction, Uncle Joe was drinking himself into
oblivion, and Weston and Whit had barely earned a cent since the store closed.
“How is your mother doing?”
“Fine, sir. Looking forward to spring, like the rest of us.”
Douglasson quickly listed new assignments for Weston, who carefully took notes,
wondering why his boss had felt the need to do this in his private office;
usually he boomed such orders over the intercom.
“There’s one more thing I wanted to mention, Weston.”
“Yes?” His stomach tensed. To save money, he was forgoing
breakfast, apart from a cup of coffee. This worked well enough on days that
produced
little stress, but any time his quiet routine
was disrupted his insides would feel stabbing pains like the ones he’d
endured during Pop’s ordeal.
“I’m afraid I need to talk to you about your brothers.”
Weston sat up straighter and folded his hands on his lap, letting the pen lie
still atop his pad. He tended to remember, with perfect clarity, whatever
people said about his brothers.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m sure this is difficult for you …. I’ve been very
satisfied with the work you’ve done for me these last—what is it,
now, three years?”
“Yes, sir, three and a half years now.” Jesus, was he being fired?
He was completely, completely still, as if Douglasson were one of those nervous
cops aiming a revolver at him. What was the difference between being fired and
being fired upon?
“Well, then, I knew it was a bit of a risk hiring you, given your lack of
experience, but it turns out it was the right decision all along. I don’t
regret it. And I knew, of course, about Jason’s brushes with the law, the
bootlegging and whatnot. It’s a shame so many people were sent the wrong
way by that foolish Prohibition business, so I was willing to give him the
benefit of the doubt on that. Bank robbing, however, is another matter. As is
murder.”
“Sir, I—” Weston stammered for a moment. “You know I
have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any of—”
“Yes, yes, of course. I realize you’re an innocent man caught in an
awkward position. But what I need you to understand, Weston, is that this
awkward position is beginning to ensnare others.”
Weston practiced breathing.
“As I’m sure you know, police in numerous states are trying to find
your brothers, as is the federal Department of Justice. They are leaving no
stone unturned, and that means they’re investigating everything they can
not only about your brothers but also about their associates, past and present.
Including their relatives. And those who employ their relatives.”
From the fourth floor, the sound of street traffic was eerily nonexistent.
Weston reached up to prevent his glasses from sliding down his sweaty nose.
“The police have … contacted you?”
“Now, Weston, a good deal of my business comes
from state and local government, or from banks that are pointed my way by
various officials. It has been brought to my attention that employing the
brother of two famous outlaws is not the wisest thing for one in my position.
That my past—albeit brief and entirely legal—association with your
father is a black mark made worse by your presence here.”
The walls of Weston’s throat were two pieces of sandpaper.
“Now, I’m not such a helpless codger, Weston, and I can hold my own
against a little friendly pressure. I’ve been here a long time, as has my
family, and my business is strong. But I am hoping, quite fervently, that this
matter will pass soon. Perhaps your brothers will … turn themselves in,
and justice will be done as, er, as
painlessly
as possible. Otherwise,
the pressures on my firm may mount.”
“I’m very, very sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble at all,
sir. And I want—”
“Now, now, it’s no trouble at all.” He waved his hand.
“But, Weston, I want you to think very carefully about what I’ve
asked you this morning. And perhaps we can do what we can to make things
right.”
“I’m, I’m sorry, sir—um, what exactly have you asked
me?”
Douglasson placed his hands on the large ash table, which that morning was
immaculate, as it was cleaned to a shine each Friday evening by Weston himself.
Then he took a business card from the top drawer of his desk and handed it to
Weston.
“It would be in everyone’s best interests for you to get in touch
with this gentleman.”
The card belonged to one Cary Delaney. Below the name was a phone number and a
Chicago address, and above it was the crest for the Justice Department’s
Bureau of Investigation.
Weston placed the card in his shirt pocket. “Of course, sir.”
The shirt was old and thin—it had been his father’s—and he
could feel the card’s corners poking at his chest the rest of the day.

He wondered if this Agent Delaney had been one of the men he had seen leaving
his mother’s house two weeks earlier. Weston had stopped by after
work to have supper with Ma and Aunt June, and when he saw
how bare the pantry was he had run out to buy groceries. That task still seemed
odd, after growing up in a shop-owning family. One of the new supermarkets had
opened up a few blocks away, but whenever he went there he felt ill. Weston
remembered the first time his father had allowed him to run the register,
remembered the bad days when they’d had to accept scrip from tire workers
whose factory had run out of cash for their pay. He loathed buying
groceries—maybe this was why he’d grown so thin— and the only
reason he did it for Ma was to spare her the same pain.
He had been walking back to her house that night, a cold one, late March, when
he heard his mother yelling.
“Do you have sons, Detective?! Do you know what it’s like to worry
about your children?!”
Twenty yards away, two men in dark suits and snap-brim hats were standing at
the edge of the Firesons’ front lawn, shoulders turned as if they had
been leaving but were now reconsidering. Weston’s mother was on the
porch, the door open. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but that’s not why
her fists were clenched.
At the risk of dropping the groceries, Weston jogged past the last two houses
and onto his mother’s lawn.
“Some of the people that they’ve killed had sons,
ma’am,” one of the men was saying, his voice accented like a cowboy
from the Westerns. “Have you considered that? I don’t think they
have.”
“What’s going on?” Weston asked.
The hats turned to face him. One of the men shared Weston’s lanky build
and probably his age, give or take, but the other was of more powerful stuff,
forged to a certain hardness, perhaps by the war. He was the one who had
spoken, and his eyes seemed to glint with pleasure.
“Well, well,” the big one said. “It’s a Firefly
Brother. In the dark it’s kinda hard to make out which one he is. Maybe
we should take him in, just in case?”
“You leave him alone,” Ma said before Weston could react.
He felt himself shrinking in the men’s eyes. “What do you
want?”
They told him their names, but he instantly forgot them when they added that
they were Justice agents; this bit of information burned into his memory and
obliterated whatever had come before.
“My brothers aren’t here. We haven’t
seen them in months. You should know that.”
“We do know a lot. And we’re learnin’ more every day.”
He touched his brim mockingly. “You have a good night now.”
Weston watched as they opened the doors of a dark Chevy, the silent young one
taking the wheel. He felt like a fool standing there clutching groceries, one
of the bags almost slipping from his grasp. He only hoped they would drive away
before eggs and bread spilled all over the walkway.
The older agent, riding shotgun, kept his eyes trained on Weston as they drove
past. Weston looked at the younger one, whose expression seemed to convey something
akin to pity for the shattered family standing in the cold. But maybe that was
only in contrast to his partner. Even indifference can feel like empathy when
you’ve grown used to so much hostility.
“What was that about?” Weston asked.
“Just asking after them.”
“I figured they would have stopped that by now.”
Ever since the previous fall, when the Firesons realized that an undercover
state cop had been boarding in Ma’s house, they knew they were being
watched. Ever since, Ma had noticed an unusual number of cars driving past each
day and early evening, always driven by two men, their eyes slowly scanning the
modest property with a mix of boredom and predation. As far as Weston knew,
though, no one in the family had been questioned in weeks.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“They told me they’d put me in jail if I ever did anything to
‘abet’ your brothers. If I ever helped them. Fed or
‘sheltered’ them.” She was still staring at the street,
either in shock or in a calm rage. “My
sons.”
The other son put a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon in, Ma. It’s
cold.”
Sammy, June’s eldest, was in the parlor reading one of his pulp
magazines,
Black Mask
or
Dime Detective
, beside a dim light. The
marine warfare of June giving her other sons a bath echoed down the steps. On
the cover of Sammy’s magazine a buxom brunette was tied to a chair,
luscious mouth frozen in a silent scream as a fedora-topped shadow crawled the
wall behind her. Weston had flipped through one of Sammy’s pulps the
other day and had found a wanted ad for Jason and Whit printed between two
stories, fact nestled where one fiction ended and the next began.
Weston wondered how much Sammy had heard of the
conversation outside, whether he had been the one to answer the door. He
remembered the time he himself had opened the door to the police late one
night, three years ago.
Ma sat in the dining room and was silent as Weston unpacked the groceries.
He had lied to the Justice agents, and he wondered if that, too, was something
that would haunt him. It had not been “months” since he’d
seen his outlaw brothers; Jason and Whit had stopped by just over a week ago.
They had called ahead to alert Ma and then sneaked in through the back, late at
night. They stayed one night and gave Ma some cash; she rarely discussed this,
but Weston always knew from her sudden silence about money. Each visit from
Jason was a financial relief, for a while at least.
Weston couldn’t deny that it was more than that. Ma’s mood would
brighten, rendering her almost unrecognizable. Her prodigal sons, returned!
Safe and healthy, and making jokes, and laughing at hers, and playing with the
kids! Weston knew she didn’t approve of their lifestyle, but those
battles had been fought between Jason and Pop years ago, and Ma’s
lifelong role as peacemaker continued despite the fact that one warring party
was now gone. In truth, Pop’s absence seemed to make her less
disapproving of Jason than she might otherwise have been; robbery was wrong,
sure, but so was what had happened to her falsely accused husband.
Ma’s good mood at her sons’ reappearances would continue after
their equally sudden departures, but after a couple of days she would descend
again, the landing always worse than the one before it, so much so that Weston
began to wish his brothers wouldn’t visit anymore, wouldn’t tease
her this way. He hated himself for it, but sometimes he wanted them to dispense
with the running and chasing, the long and torturous prologue, and get on with
the obvious conclusion, allow their mother to grieve in peace. Grieving over
people who weren’t even dead yet—this was cruelty, and he hated his
brothers for forcing her into such a position.
He knew that his brothers would die, and badly, and soon. The ending was
inevitable, just as it had been for past hoodlums like Jesse James and Billy
the Kid. The only question was whether it would be at the hands of the police,
jealous associates, or court-ordered executioners.
After unpacking the groceries, Weston walked into the
dining room, where his mother was still sitting at the bare table, the gas lamp
too dim.
“That should set you for the week.” He told her he needed to head
home and kissed her on the forehead.
“Thank you,” she said, but her eyes seemed to be on something else.
If he were Jason, he would have known a joke to brighten her face. But mirth
tasted funny on his lips, like bad moonshine that skipped the buzz and went
straight to the headache.
The steps creaked as he walked upstairs to say good night to June and the boys.
He noticed that the banister was coming loose from some of its posts, another
repair for the list. He knocked on the bathroom door, which wasn’t quite
shut, and walked into the warm air as June was violently towel-drying
Mikey’s hair. The tub was draining, toy boats capsized in the vortex.
June asked if Uncle Weston would like to read the boys bedtime stories and the
kids cheered. Weston had been hoping merely to say good night and make his
escape, but he saw that June was even more tired than he was, so he played
along.
After reading to them about trains and heroes and happy endings, he walked
downstairs and saw June sitting at the dining-room table, sipping what looked
like bourbon. Her graying hair was in a bun, and patches of her red cardigan
were still wet from the bath. It was barely eight, but she told him that Ma had
excused herself for the night, saying she wasn’t feeling well. Weston
wondered if June knew about the federal visitors.
“Have you heard from them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Your brothers.”
“No.”
She stared at her glass. “Sometimes I wish … they’d just turn
themselves in.”
He had overheard her arguing with Ma about them, not infrequently. She’d
even told him she suspected that her late husband’s past applications for
state aid had been denied because of Jason’s run-ins with the law, as if
the state of Ohio had blacklisted the family. To Weston it was insane to
believe a few bureaucrats in the aid office had any clue that Joe’s
nephew had been a bootlegger, but now that Weston had Douglasson’s
warning ringing in his ears he wondered if June could have been right.
“They’re doing what they can to help the
family,” Weston said.
“I get the dirtiest looks from people on the street. What they think of
us.”
“I get some, too, but I get just as many people telling me how
they’re rooting for them. More, actually.”
She rolled her eyes. “Male fantasies, all of it. Women know better.
They’re tearing your mother’s heart out, you know. Bit by bit, day
by day.”
He needed to change the subject. “The boys seem to be doing fairly
well.”
“Mikey still cries for Joe at night, sometimes.”
He didn’t know what to say. He made a short frown.
“It wakes up the other two.”
She looked at him as if she expected that he, as someone who’d lost his
own father, would have some advice for her. But Weston had been twenty-two when
Pop died, three years ago. Compared with little Mikey and Pete and Sammy,
he’d been an old man. Then why had he felt like such a kid?
They forced themselves to chat about mundane matters and soon they were both
yawning, so he bade her good night. With his hand on the doorknob he turned for
a last glance. June was still sitting there, staring at her glass like she
wished she’d poured herself more.