The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (5 page)

At the third ring, Jason tried to dispel the tension by telling his mother,
“It’s all right, you can answer it.”
She picked up the receiver. “Hello? … Yes, this is Margaret Fireson
…. Yes, of course, I remember you, Sergeant Higgins.” Jason and
Whit exchanged glances, neither of them knowing that name. Their mother was
silent a long while, her expression confused. She had been staring at the
floor, but now her gaze shifted to Jason and Whit. “Of course,” she
said suddenly, as if she hadn’t realized it was her turn.
“That’s fine …. Goodbye.”
“What is it?” Jason asked after she hung up.
“It was the Points North police. He said that someone has … stolen
your bodies. Souvenir hunters—he referred to them as
morbids
.
‘Some morbids must have taken them.’ He assured me that he would
find the …
bodies
, and have them shipped to the funeral home of my
choice. He said he’d call again once he’d tracked them down.”
“Crazy people out there,” Jason said,
calmly threading a finger through the handle of his coffee cup. “Poor
fools got the wrong bodies.”
It was decided that the Firesons—those publicly known to be alive, that
is—should go about their day as they would normally be expected to.
June’s boys cleaned the house while June stayed upstairs, sewing and
doing needlework for the Salvation Army. Playing the role of grieving mother,
Margaret stayed home, too, and as more calls trickled in from friends
who’d read the paper she stoically accepted their condolences. At
Jason’s behest, she refused their kind offers to visit, deliver food,
clean the house. If she sounded somewhat less mournful than the friends had expected,
perhaps they assumed she was still in shock. But after the fourth such call she
found it difficult to feign sorrow, and allowed herself such comments as
“Well, I’m not sure I believe all this, you know. My boys are
smart, maybe there’s something fishy about these stories.” Her
friends doubtless pitied her for being in denial.
Weston, who seemed to be living at home again, told the brothers he had been
given the day off but had some errands to run. On his way out the door, he
crossed paths with Jason in the front parlor.
“Listen, Wes,” Jason said quietly, remembering their last
conversation a few days ago. “I wanted to talk to you about
something.”
Weston just nodded and seemed suddenly nervous, even scared.
“I’m sorry for some of the things I said that night,” Jason
said. He wasn’t good at this. “It was a … a bad time. I
didn’t mean all that.”
Weston nodded again, as if he hoped he could nod this all away, all the bad
blood between them, without having to utter a word.
“I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, being the only one
who’s home,” Jason continued, “looking after Ma and June. I
know I can be a lousy brother sometimes. But what me and Whit do …
It’s a little bit easier knowing that you’re here, you know?”
Weston’s eyes filled again. Jason hadn’t known how his judgmental
brother would respond to his apology, but he hadn’t expected this. It
only made him feel worse.
“You’re a good brother, Wes.”
Weston folded his arms, hugging himself, and his neck hung down for a moment.
He wiped at his eyes and looked up again.
“Thanks, Jason. I’m sorry, too.”
“It’s been a hard time, I know.” He put a hand on
Weston’s shoulder, squeezed. “But we’re all going to be okay,
you understand? We’re going to stick together.”
“Yeah.” Weston stared at the floor. “I know we will.”

III.

N
ew facts emerged after Darcy’s
third drink. The words on the newspapers danced for her now, up and to the
right as if hoping to escape her gaze. Damned words, always running from you.
Always hiding things. She stared and stared and even with her eyes wet she
insisted on wrenching every last bit of truth from the stories before her.
Rain splashed through the window she had shattered with a highball glass.
Thunder rolled over Lake Michigan and crashed upon the city. It was midmorning
yet the skies were dark with the wrath of an afternoon storm, nature itself
confused, nothing making sense.
She had tried to call Veronica, but there was no answer. She had even used her
own telephone, which Jason had forbidden for sensitive calls. But would the
police still be monitoring her now? She had tried other numbers, dialing safe
houses and the brothers’ sundry associates, but the few people who
answered insisted they didn’t know anything. She felt that
she
didn’t know anything, no matter how many times she read the stories. And
something akin to fear, tainted with guilt, kept her from dialing Mrs. Fireson
in Lincoln City. How could Darcy talk to the mother of two dead sons? Would she
somehow be blamed?
On her desk were discarded copies of the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Daily
Times
, the
Daily News
, and the
Herald-Examiner
. She would
have scanned the red sheets, too, if they had written about him instead of
carping about
their political goals and gripes,
overlooking what was truly important.
Nothing
was important but him. And
they were telling her he was gone.
Two days earlier, she and Veronica had driven separately to Valparaiso, each
taking a long and circuitous route to ensure that they weren’t followed,
checking into the tiny motel under the names they’d been assigned. By
midnight the brothers were officially late. Ronny had fallen asleep at some
point—after endlessly fussing around the room, unsure what to do with
herself without her toddler, whom she had left with relatives—but Darcy
had smoked all through the night, sitting in the room’s sole chair and peering
through a crack in the blinds. Few autos passed that night, and none of them
stopped.
Surely the brothers would have called, unless something had happened. Or
perhaps they were afraid that the girls were being watched— had they been
followed after all? Did the police know about the motel? Parked cars in the lot
of a nearby filling station became suspect. Maids were shooed away. By the next
afternoon, she and Ronny had played cards and read the magazines they’d
brought along, trying to act like friends, but without the presence of the
brothers their true feelings were harder to conceal. Frayed nerves dispensed
with etiquette. By the second morning they felt still more worried, and were
getting hungry. Ronny missed her son and was anxious about leaving him too
long. The brothers must have busted a tire, Darcy had said, trying to sound
casual and unconcerned. Maybe they heard about a roadblock and needed to take a
detour. They’ll get back in touch. She had invited Ronny to Chicago with
her, but Ronny had declined the offer. She had been cold about it, Darcy
thought. As if she feared what was coming and didn’t want to be in
Darcy’s presence when it happened.
Back in Chicago later that day, Darcy had heard the cry as she approached the
first newsstand. The news was called out like a military victory, and she was
the foreigner in her own town, left to mourn what others were celebrating.
The headlines she saw from twenty paces away. Competing for the largest font
and most dramatic adjectives. One of them opting instead for bluntness: FIREFLY
BROTHERS KILLED. The simplicity was an anvil dropping on her heart, pushing the
breath from her body, doubling her over.
She didn’t remember whether she had paid for her copies or just
walked off with them. She didn’t remember how
she’d made it back to her room, but here she was. The wind picked up and
rainwater darkened the pages. She lifted them to keep the ink from bleeding, to
keep it from seeping into whatever mundane nonsense was printed on the back, to
keep these worlds distinct. Even as the world was collapsing upon itself. Even
as she was having trouble breathing. Another drink will help. Who needs a
glass. Who needs something to mix it with. It’s supposed to hurt on the
way down.

On the running boards, it had occurred to her that she was the only one
smiling.
What a beautiful day! Red and yellow leaves danced in the air before her,
cartwheeling on their descent, some of them even brushing against her face as
the Buick careened through the woods east of that small Indiana town. Early
autumn and calm, no wind that morning, but as the car sped along, her hair was
horizontal, the tips snapping at the face of the poor sap behind her. She
reveled in the way the day felt against her face, the way life felt against her
face, as she rushed past it, looking for what lay beyond.
This had all been very unplanned, of course. One does not plan to be a hostage
in a bank robbery. It would have felt like a dream, but in a dream you
can’t feel pain, and her fingers did hurt; it was hardly
easy
to
hold on to the side of the Buick like this, as it sped along at God only knew
how many miles per hour. But my
word
this was fun.
The man across from her vomited on the roof of the Buick. That was unfortunate.
There were four of them, a man and a woman on each side, positioned there by
the bank robbers as a human shield. And they did their job well—the
police hadn’t fired a single shot. Darcy was in front on the passenger
side, and she wished she could have bent down to peer inside. She wanted
another glimpse of the gang leader, the man in that fabulous suit, the man who
had winked at her so absurdly that she had laughed. Laughed out loud, her voice
echoing off the marble walls of the very, very silent bank. She had been
sitting with one of the clerks, arranging to pick up some money she’d
wired from her hometown bank in
Chicago to sustain an
extended visit at the home of her cousins here in the country, when the gang
leader had entered with his suit and his large gun. After informing everyone of
the rules and procedures, he had passed the teller stalls and was maneuvering
through the various desks and chairs in search of the bank president, who was
cowering behind a desk.
After she’d laughed at the leader’s wink, he had smiled a bit,
bemused. He hadn’t expected that response. But then he had walked past
her, toward the bank president. As she watched him move, she caught sight of
the clerk sitting opposite her, who silently moved his mouth to ask her, quite
accusingly, if she was crazy.
Yes, she wanted to answer, minutes later, as October recklessly flew through
her hair. Clearly. The faces of the other three hostages were all white, their
jaws as clenched as their knuckles on the roof rails, and one woman prayed, not
loudly enough for Darcy to hear distinct words over the engines and the sirens
and the dirt road crunching beneath the tires, but the pleading tone was still
recognizable.
She had never been one to scare easily. Though her twenty years on this earth
had been financially comfortable, her life story had contained enough ominous
chapters and dangerous cliffhangers for her to be rather unfazed by the
introduction of new threats. She had learned about the suddenness of death at a
tender age, and had learned that she could survive great
damage—self-inflicted and otherwise—with her sense of humor intact,
though it was a bit darker than it used to be. Perhaps that was why, when she
later reflected upon the bank robbery itself, she realized she had never been
concerned about the possibility of her own death. She had no husband to leave
behind, no children to orphan, no mother to damn into endless grief.
It had happened so quickly, she was really quite impressed. And with such
subterfuge that she wasn’t at all sure how many of them there were. The
one who had winked, obviously. The one who stood guarding the door, holding a
gun identical to the leader’s. But different people kept emerging and it
was difficult for her to keep up.
And about this leader. He was tall, he had a jaw sharp enough to etch diamond,
and the moment she heard his voice she was convinced. Convinced of what, she
wasn’t sure. Just
convinced
. He could have read the most
outlandish children’s story and she would have believed him. He
could have announced that he was here to rustle up
recruits for a new communist army bent on unseating Roosevelt and she would
have been convinced it was so, and convinced it was just. He could have told her
that this entire, impressively choreographed, painstakingly timed, undoubtedly
risky endeavor was all a ruse to win her heart, and she would have been
convinced. Her only disappointment was that he spoke so little.
As the gang leader strode past the tellers, Darcy saw him notice a customer at
another desk slowly pulling his hands away from a small stack of bills. The
poor man looked like an old farmhand, and the expression on his face, Darcy
saw, was not crestfallen but placid, as if he was so accustomed to weathering
disasters that a gun-wielding bandit was well within the realm of the expected.
“You can pick that back up, sir,” the leader had told the farmer as
he walked past. “We’re not here for your money, just the
bank’s. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
What else had he said? She tried to remember as the dirt road became a bit less
accommodating and she tightened her grip. “I’m going to have to ask
you for that combination, Mr. President.” And “All righty, boys,
we’re down to a minute” and “I really like those shoes, did
you buy them in town?” and “Get a chair for that lady over there,
she looks faint” and, finally, joyously, “All righty, you and you
and you and”—the finger pretending to pick her arbitrarily, even
though the slight grin belied any such thing—
“you
,
you’ll need to step outside with us.” Darcy knew the difference
between fate and desire, thank you.
But that was all he’d said. How many words was that in total? Fifty?
Seventy, perhaps? She wondered how many thousands of dollars they had taken
with them in those Gladstone bags, how many bills each of his words had brought
in. A man like that could talk in gold. She only wanted to hear him say
something more.
The robbers had silently corralled the hostages in the front of the bank lobby
and marched them outside, where Darcy noticed the phalanx of police officers
standing helplessly on the sidewalk. This was when she first realized that she
was in some modicum of danger. Not from this dapper robber and his
assistants—the man positively exuded calm—but from the surely
terrified police and their weapons. Her stomach tightened.
She was standing on the Buick’s running board when one of the officers
called upon the robbers to halt and surrender. The thieves laughed
and informed him that any attempt to intervene could cost
the lives of these nice hostages. Alarming words indeed, but she looked at the
officers and saw their meek expressions, as if they knew there was no point in
trying to stop the crooks and had spoken up only for appearance’s sake.
“They’re going to kill us!” the man who had vomited now
screamed to his fellow hostages as they rocketed through the woods west of
town. The police Fords were long gone, left behind by the speeding Buick. Given
her background, Darcy knew enough about cars to be certain that this did not
have a typical Buick engine beneath its hood. And she of course had noticed
when one of the robbers in the backseat rolled down a window and threw what
looked like tacks and roofing nails onto the road to delay their pursuers. She
didn’t know how long they’d been driving—one minute? ten? so
hard to judge when the pace of your heart has changed—but it was long
enough to exhaust the police. Initially, there had been two cars full of bank
robbers (the other, also a Buick, had been similarly upholstered with four
hostages); she didn’t know if the second had been apprehended or if it
had fled in a different direction.
The dirt road smoothed out again, and the bandits decreased their speed from
reckless to very fast. They had been driving through woods— the
multicolored confetti of oaks and elms showering them as acorns skittered
beneath the wheels—but now the forest opened before them, revealing wide
green fields interspersed with farmland. Against these colors the clear sky looked
richer than usual.
“They’re going to kill us!” the man repeated. His heavy beard
and mustache were greasy, Darcy remembered. “We’ve seen their
faces! They won’t let us live!”
“We
all
saw their faces!” Darcy shut him up. Really.
“The bank was full of people, and they didn’t kill any of
them!”
Indeed, the thieves hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t pulled a trigger.
“I know how these things work!” the man insisted. “There was
a bank robbery in South Bend a month ago, and they killed the two people they
took with them! I say we let go now and take our chances in the woods!”
The prayer’s voice had only grown louder.
“That wasn’t the Firefly Brothers in South Bend!” replied the
man behind Darcy. “That was some other gang! And I’m not letting go
at this speed!”
As if on cue, the Buick began to slow down as it approached a crossing
with another country road, where an empty car was waiting.
The landscape was flat and deserted, occasional silos the only dark scratches
on the horizon.
“I’m going to let go and run for it!” the man said, shifting
his gaze among the three of them to enlist their participation. Then his
fingers uncoiled and he was gone. Darcy turned and saw his body rolling on the
ground, dirt and pebbles rising in a cloud.
The Buick parked beside the other car.
“Everybody back up three paces!” commanded a deep voice. Once the
hostages had obeyed—each of them flexing tight fingers finally released
from their death grips—the doors opened. One of the robbers sprinted back
toward the escaped hostage, who was slowly attempting to rise, moaning.
Three other men exited the car.
“Hope that wasn’t too rocky of a ride,” the gang leader said
to the hostages, his eyes lingering on Darcy. A long, double-handled gun
dangled like an afterthought from his right hand. With his jacket open, Darcy
also saw that he had a pistol in a shoulder holster. “The roads out here
leave something to be desired.”
“Please don’t hurt us,” begged the woman who’d been
praying.
“Why would we do a thing like that? You’ve served your purpose, and
did a particularly good job of it, I might add. Now, we are going to have to
tie you and you”—he pointed to the other man—“to this
post here, but the cops will find you soon enough. And it’s a nice warm
day—it’ll be good to get some air.”
As one of the robbers escorted the wounded escapee back to the parked cars, the
rest of the gang busily moved packages, bags, weapons, and gasoline cans from
the Buick into the other car, a black Pontiac. They all wore gloves, which
struck Darcy as odd, considering that none of their faces were masked.
“So you’re the Firefly Brothers?” Darcy asked the ringleader.
“That’s what they call you?”
He looked at her appraisingly, as if surprised her voice wasn’t
quivering. Perhaps he preferred quiverers? She didn’t think so.
“They call us a lot of things. But we’ll take that one over some of
the others.”
She had heard of them. They were making some noise in the lesser
parts of the Midwest, though not in her hometown of
Chicago, where the Syndicate held something of a monopoly on crime—or
perhaps only an oligopoly, now that Capone was in jail. The papers must not
have run any photographs, though. Surely she wouldn’t have been able to
blithely flip past a picture of this face.
“So why am I not being tied up with them?” she asked him as two of
the robbers began tying the other hostages’ wrists to the post of a
collapsing fence.
“We still need some company for a bit longer, if you don’t
mind,” the ringleader told her. “But don’t worry, this time
you can sit inside with us. Won’t be long.”
“So do you have a name, or is it just Firefly Brother Number One?”
“Better not let my brother hear you say that—he’ll take
offense. My name’s Jason. And you are …?”
“Darcy Windham.”
“You aren’t related to—”
“He’s my father.”
“My, my. An automotive heiress.” He tipped his fedora.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“I’m afraid I’m not terribly close to my old man, so
don’t ask me for any free cars.”
“I’ve never had trouble finding free cars. You aren’t fond of
your old man?”
“Well, he did name an axle after me, but that’s about the extent of
his familial affections.”
Jason smiled. “It’s a form of immortality.”
“Yes, a rather greasy one.”
The other robbers had finished tying up the hostages, and Jason motioned for
her to get into the backseat of the Pontiac.
“You’re just going to leave this Buick out here to rot?”
“Afraid so. The cops saw it, so the cops can have it.”
“Why don’t you wear masks?”
“I hope you aren’t calling me ugly.”
“No,” and she found it impossible not to return his smile as he put
a hand on her shoulder to guide her into the car. “But it does make it
possible for your hostages to identify you later, doesn’t it?”
The man who’d vomited screamed, “Jesus, lady, shut up!”
“Hey, watch it, buddy!” Jason snapped. But
when he turned back to Darcy he was smiling again. “It’s hot under
a mask. Plus it’s hard to breathe. And who cares if people can identify
me?”
She still hadn’t quite gotten into the car. “You aren’t
afraid of the police?”
“Are you?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Never? Then why do you have that gleam in your eye, Miss Windham?”