The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Gray Dogs, Part 4

With the brain box in the hands of Daedalus Spark, Mickey Malloy and the officials make their play. All they have to do is catch the Man from Tomorrow, the Smiling Man, and the Montuoso crime family together, red-handed. What could go wrong?

This is the fourth and final installment of Gray Dogs. It is the seventh and final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, and 3 first. This features characters from and spoilers for The Case of the Man from Tomorrow and various issues of the Bastion Americana Freedom Journal.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, gore, death, mild swearing, tobacco use, alcohol use, Nazis, creeps.

THURSDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 30, 1943
CAMELIA HOUSE, JONES PLANTATION
COUSHATTA, LOUISIANA

It took Uncle Gio’s goons just three days to track down the cops who’d dragged Eizhürst’s bleeding body out of the chaos at the Union Stockyards.

Those cops, card-carrying Garrisonians one and all, gave up what they’d done with the perforated kraut after only ten minutes of Selvaggio questioning.

Then it was a matter of tracking a gaggle of trucks, two trains, and one beat-to-hell Model T to find the run-down plantation house in central Louisiana where they’d stashed him. If Eizhürst’s two bullet wounds hadn’t been infected before, his hideout looked like a good place to change that.

“We even going to knock?” Tommy Capano asked. He peered at the mold-infested rat’s nest through a set of binoculars from where they’d parked half-a-mile away. The barren cotton fields gave them a clear view of the soon-to-be ruin. “The place looks like it’s waiting to come down around our ears.”

“From what I understand, he ain’t walking,” Mickey Malloy replied. “This will be our best chance to snag him.”

“If you were trying to arrest him, you would’ve brought one of your Boy Scouts,” Capano pointed out.

“You may be right,” Mick grunted. He was playing coy, but there wasn’t any question about it. His last attempt to put Eizhürst behind bars and it had gotten eight officials killed.

It was time to try it another way.

“You couldn’t pay me to hide out in there,” Capano huffed. The peeling paint and sagging siding did not suggest ‘safe house,’ but that was Eizhürst’s style: disguise and distract.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a steel door behind that screen door,” Mick said. He didn’t mention that it would also be Eizhürst’s style if the whole place was rigged to blow.

“How do you feel about the goons?” Capano asked. Mick focused his binoculars on the two dipshits guarding the place. They were both slumped down in rocking chairs on the rickety porch, napping in the afternoon sun like a set of fat tomcats. Neither had moved in the twenty minutes they’d been watching. One had a pistol within arm’s reach on a lopsided card table, the other would have to get up to grab the shotgun he’d leaned against the window sill.

Mick wasn’t worried about either one of them.

“We can take ‘em,” Mick said. “Boot to ass, then boot to door.”

“Sounds familiar. You ain’t one for learning new tricks, are you?” Capano wondered, though he should be one to talk.

“Buddy, just ‘cause I’m old don’t mean I can’t still bite,” Mick grumbled. The ex-mobster chuckled.

“Yeah, well cheers to that,” Capano said. He took another sip from his flask. He didn’t attempt to pass it to Mick; every previous offer had been turned down. Mick felt a grumble in his gut and a heat in the back of his throat even thinking about it. Something about booze had been giving him a tender stomach lately.

“Let’s wait a bit, we don’t have any cover here,” Mick suggested.

“Fair enough,” Capano said.

The pair sat around flapping their gums for a while as they watched the sun set behind the old manor house. There hadn’t been much action for either of them since the thing at the Union Stockyards. Capano had been kicked out of wherever he’d been holed up and was effectively on the run in his own city. There were a ton of Montuoso soldiers left in Chicago and every single one of them wanted to take up the reins. None of them had the resources or weapons that Stino had gotten from the Abwehr, so their next best bet for legitimacy was the head of the Chicago Slugger. All that mess kept Uncle Gio busy and forced Capano to hightail it out of town.

Mick had sent Lucky Ford on his way and the kid had managed to get wrapped up in some more bullshit, in Indiana of all places, but that was on him. Beasley had been reassigned to the west coast, and Artyom was locked back up at Zoo Base without any chance of further field work in his foreseeable future. Mick wasn’t sure what happened to Nea, but she’d never been a fan of his. He was sure the report she’s written as his archivist would put an even bigger target on his back with her uncle, Inspector General Klavin.

But Mick didn’t wait around to find out. He’d hit the road with his F.D.R. signature stamp, his Bastard bag of goodies, and a fugitive Chicago Slugger. The pair had been tracking down the Smiling Man for damn-near two weeks, eating the greasiest dive food they could find between Chicago and Louisiana, calling Marge or Gio at every stop for updates. It reminded him of the old days.

While they waited, the good-ole-boys on guard duty managed to get even sloppier. All the better for the Billy Club Bastard and the Chicago Slugger.

Neither guard noticed the men in black until they were at the foot of the porch.

“What in the hell?” the semi-conscious one asked. He blinked a few times before his eyes went wide as headlights. He scrambled for his pistol, shouting: “Holy shit, Don, it’s him. Don!”

Before he could shout any more, the Chicago Slugger was on him. He used his heavy shield to ram the man, card table, and rocking chair together into the wall. The whole old house shook with the impact.

Don groaned awake. The Bastard rushed him, club in motion, only for Don to lean too far back in his rocker and tumble backward, landing sprawled with his shotgun in hand.

The Slugger’s goon twisted around enough to get a bead on the old mobster. He squeezed off a shot, deafening so close. The bullet pinged off the Slugger’s shield and his lead-cored baseball bat came around to knock the sweaty redneck senseless.

Don fumbled with his shotgun, trying to rack it. He was drunk and half-asleep and he jammed a round into the breach trying to pump it short. The Bastard threw the fallen rocking chair clear off the porch, stomped over, and thumped Don right on the noggin. He snatched the shotgun out of the K.O.’d drunk’s hands and slammed it on the porch rail, hoping to break it in half. Instead, the termite-gnawed board splintered clean through.

“That would have been impressive,” the Chicago Slugger chuckled behind his black plate-metal mask.

“Yeah, I’ve done it before,” the Bastard grumbled.

“Sure thing, pal,” the Slugger said.

The Bastard muttered something about the Slugger’s lineage as he racked every round out of the shotgun before tossing it as far as he could into the field. The Slugger pulled the clip out of his guy’s Luger and pocketed it, then sent the pistol flying after the shotgun. They dragged the two guards together and lashed them to a post with their own belts.

The Bastard rifled through their wallets. Card-carrying Garrisonians, of course, and licensed P.I.’s. He wasn’t sure who was doing licensing anymore, but they needed to up their standards. Both goons carried crappy little brass badges issued by Pinkerton Review Services, the company that claimed to be in charge of all Garrisonian security concerns. If Eizhürst really was inside, that was the nail in the coffin between the Garrisonians and the Abwehr. The Bastard didn’t have to be a detective when the dots insisted on connecting themselves.

He pocketed the badges so the Office could get to work on fabricating some copies.

“If there was anybody else in there trying to kill us, they’d already be shooting, right?” the Chicago Slugger observed. The Bastard grunted in agreement.

“What are we expecting in there?” the Slugger asked.

“Nazi bullshit, I suspect,” the Bastard replied. When Mick had figured out where Eizhürst was headed, he’d used his last call to have Marge pull some ADA records for him. They had helped paint the full picture:

The Jones family was old Louisiana. They’d made their money the old way, too, by making others earn it the hard way. After the Civil War, about all of their ill-gotten gains were redistributed. They’d wound up with a beat-up house they couldn’t afford to maintain and a few cotton fields they didn’t have the aptitude or initiative to work. The Bastard thought they’d gotten off better than they deserved. They thought themselves the victims of great injustice, no matter how much horror their lost fortunes had been founded on. The Joneses were just the kind of people the Abwehr sought; it was no wonder they’d given the Smiling Man refuge in their home.

“Recognize either of them?” the Slugger asked of the trussed goons.

The Bastard shook his head. The pair were bedraggled, unshaven, and sloshed. Both white men, and both in their late forties. The last Jones, Carl, was in his sixties and retired. His daughters had long since moved out of state, even further than his wife had gone. Whoever they were, they’d likely showed up on the Abwehr’s dime.

“Well, you figure we’ll blow up if we try the front door?” the Slugger asked. The Bastard’s glare was positively poisonous. He’d barely survived the bombing in Chicago the last time he’d found Eizhürst: a lot of other officials hadn’t. The Slugger cleared his throat, then apologized: “Right, sorry.”

The Bastard stalked past him and tried the knob, standing off to the side a bit in case anyone inside was armed and frisky. He figured they wouldn’t put guards on a booby-trapped door but he wouldn’t put it past a Nazi to lie in wait with a heater.

The door creaked open on unoiled hinges. When it didn’t burst into splinters under a copper-jacketed barrage, the Bastard stepped inside.

The place was as much a mess on the inside as it was outside, and the stink alone almost bowled the Bastard over. Teetering towers loomed over him in the every corner of the foyer. He felt around in his pockets until he found his Franklin torch and illuminated the room in fungal blue light.

“What is that smell?” the Slugger asked over his shoulder. With his steel mask, he couldn’t even pinch his nose.

“Mold,” the Bastard replied. He swung his light around, sloshing the glowing mold inside. Every pile stacked in every corner, on every surface around them was made up of festering, spotted, fuzzy newspapers. The brown stains on the ceiling matched the nastiest of the towers. They could barely move inside, relegated to a narrow paths through the hoard.

“What the Hell,” the Slugger grunted to himself. They could almost see floating spores in the blue light. The Bastard eased his way through; the last thing he wanted for to collapse one of the piles of infested pulp onto himself. Everywhere he looked

The path led to a set of stairs up to the second floor. Neither man trusted them, but there was nowhere else to go. The parlor and rooms beyond were packed tight with papers. No one had been anywhere but the path or the stairs in years.

“There’s got to be a thousand copies of something called the Manifest Creed here. What the Hell is The Wanderer? Whatever Good Health is, I’m looking at stacks of it. And a dozen different Bund rags, one called Social Justice, and about a million Freedom Journals,” the Slugger paused to read each of the decaying stacks as they tip-toed past. He nudged each one with his bat, shoving them over in slimy, musty avalanches. Every piece of paper in the place was lousy with nutty, reactionary nonsense, all supported, if not written whole-cloth, by the krauts.

The ceiling creaked above them as the fallen trash settled. Someone was moving up there.

The two masked men looked at each other with the same idea in their heads then then bolted for the stairs. The decrepit house shuddered under the impacts as they took two steps at a time.

The upstairs hallway was choked with more newsletters, manifestos, and exposés piled so high that they covered up the yellow photos and articles plastered over the walls. The air was even heavier up there, and wet.

“God, and I thought downstairs smelled bad,” the Slugger wheezed. The Bastard sniffed the air before remembering that his bandana was treated to filter smoke, gas, and various flavors of foulness. The stench hit him like a brick: a cursed, rancid blend of sweat, shit, mold, and vomit.

“That’s somebody dying,” the Bastard answered. Between his time in the trenches and on the homicide beat, he knew that aroma all too well.

They advanced slowly, eyes locked on the closed doors before them, two on either side. The Slugger burst through the closest only to find a bathroom piled so deep with newspapers that it was near unusable. Someone had carved a small cleft into the mess to get access to a grimy toilet, but the Bastard din’t trust the look of it. The tub was overflowing with Silver Legion recruiting pamphlets and had not been used in a long, long time. The mirror had a poster of a grinning, shit-eating Clyde Lehrer, the Garrisonians’ head honcho, pasted over it.

“Weird,” the Bastard muttered, then moved on.

The second door was a closet that spilled about a hundred spent typewriter ribbons across the narrow hall. The two men stepped over the scattered detritus, careful not to slip.

“Bedroom,” the Bastard whispered, pointing at the third door. The Slugger nodded. They lurched through only to come face-to-face with more stacks of crap packed up to the ceiling. They swung their lights around, looking for whoever they’d heard earlier. The beams picked up on stained wallpaper behind the piles, depicting castles, knights, and maidens. It had been a kid’s room, once.

“Holy much shit can one house fit?” the Slugger asked. The Bastard shook his head. He’d been in cleaner city dumps. Like the bathroom, the bedroom had a nook carved out of the mess. This one was large enough to fit a card table and folding chair, a typewriter, an electric lamp, and a telephone. They were all disgusting. The pile of dirty plates next to the table was nearly as tall as it was. On the far side of it, a tower of typed sheets had collapsed. A ream’s worth of papers slid to the floor while they watched.

“Maybe that’s what we heard, that one giving way,” the Slugger suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” the Bastard replied. He watched the pages settle. The room was so tight with crap that he couldn’t imagine anyone hiding in there. “One more room.”

They moved on down the hall to the master bedroom. The stink became more intense with every step toward the end of the hall. The Bastard’s filtering bandana couldn’t keep it out anymore, and he could hardly imagine what the Slugger was having to endure.

“Me first,” the Slugger said. He tucked back behind his shield and shoved the door open, ready to absorb whatever gunfire would be coming his way. No shots came but he staggered back like he was stitched up nonetheless. He was practically retching as he stumbled over Mick’s feet: “God!”

A swarm of black flies followed him out. The Bastard swatted to keep them out of his eyes and then braved the dark room.

The stink was oppressive. The piles of documents that dominated the rest of the Jones house had been shoved aside to create something akin to an opera shell around a lone four-poster bed. Banks of burnt-down candles flanked it from either side. Someone was in the bed, sunken into the mattress.

Aside from the dispersing flies, nothing else moved.

The Bastard approached, club in hand. His boots crunched across dried flowers and dead flies. The mattress was stain and collapsed; every sour bodily fluid he cared name was caked and crusted across it.

The man in the bed did not react to him or his light.

“What the Hell is this?” the Slugger asked from the door.

The Bastard didn’t answer. He approached the bed and leaned over it, letting his blue light linger on the man’s sunken face. Even without the makeup, wig, prosthetic nose, and demonic smile, he recognized Eizhürst instantly.

The corpse before him was naked to the waist, bloated, and putrefying. The two exit wounds in his chest were puffy and purpled with glazed infection. His lips, nose, and cheeks were gone, but that wasn’t new. The spy had lost them to Russian frostbite years before, leaving only waxy scars behind. His once-blue eyes were dry and locked onto the water-stained ceiling, his hands, so quick and serpentine when lashing out at enemies or subordinates, were twisted into perpetual claws.

Eizhürst was truly dead. He had died slowly, in the dark, in some insane sycophant’s garbage heap, in unimaginable pain. The Bastard should have felt some satisfaction at that, but he had seen enough death. One more didn’t solve anything.

“Looks like we got him,” the Slugger offered.

“Yeah, he’s got,” the Bastard replied. He didn’t feel victorious. He didn’t know what he felt. Maybe he needed a cigarette, or some fresh air. “Let’s get out of here. I’m not hauling that thing down those stairs and there’s enough reading material here to last one of my teams a month.”

They made for the door and heard the telltale creak again, from the kid’s room. The Slugger was closer and bolted for it. The Bastard was a few steps behind and he could hear someone speaking as he charged into the room.

“Fine, you finally got me.”

The Slugger had a balding, bespectacled white man pinned against a mountain of Freedom Journals, his bat placed squared in the middle of the man’s chest. The strange man was decently dressed and had his hands up. The collapsed papers they’d noticed before were disturbed; the man had been hiding beneath them.

“Who the Hell are you?” the Bastard asked.

“Well, you’re in my house,” the man replied. Carl Jones. “Of course, I know who you boys are.”

“Yeah, looks like you’re a big reader,” the Slugger scoffed.

“One has to be in this day and age,” Jones said with a smirk. “You can never trust what the truth is.”

“Here’s something you can take to the bank: you’re under arrest,” the Bastard said. He wasn’t trying to has philosophical debates with a Garrisonian recluse.

“I see, under what pretense?” Jones asked. He winced as the Slugger pressed the baseball bat harder against his ribs.

“Harboring an asshole,” the Bastard answered. “That’s a dead Nazi you got in the other room.”

“No, no, that’s Mister Schmidt, a recent acquaintance,” Jones said. “He died of natural causes. I took him in as a favor to some new friends. If they’d wanted him to live, they’d have sent him to a doctor.”

“’Schmidt,’” the Slugger snorted.

“Is ‘harboring an asshole’ a federal charge? Or state? I wasn’t familiar with that statute, Mister Malloy,” Jones said. “In fact, what is your jurisdiction? Do you have a warrant to be here? Is Mister Capano your archivist? Because you’d need one of those on hand to pursue any investigations in an, ah, ‘official’ capacity, wouldn’t you?”

“You talk a lot,” the Bastard replied, but just because Jones jabber-jawed it didn’t mean he was wrong. The Bastard and the Slugger were off the books. The Office was under a magnifying glass, and without an archivist and Klavin’s say-so he did not have any authority or protection while he was out in the wild. If what he’d just done got out, he was as likely to end up behind bars as those two Pinkertons on the porch were. And it sounded like Carl Jones was fixing to sing like a songbird.

The Bastard pulled his bandana down so he could breathe. The stink hit him like a box car. He managed to wheeze:

“Why are you talking so much?”

“Because I can say whatever I want, you clod,” Jones said. “Anything you do from this point on only helps me. Wherever you take me, I’ll be free in forty-eight hours and in ninety-six I will be on every front page and radio show, burying you.”

“No one will care what some nut says,” Mick growled.

“They already do,” Jones said, grinning wide, gesturing to his typewriter and the towers of Bastion Americana Freedom Journals around it. “That’s why I assumed you were here for me.”

Mick felt a pit open wide in his gut. He had gone looking for trouble, and God damn it if he hadn’t found it.

“You might be familiar with my pen name,” Jones continued. Mick knew what he was about to hear before Jones spoke; the name was plastered across every front page on every Journal all around them. “I sometimes go by ‘Arnold Pondletter.’”

Mickey Malloy was used to stepping in shit, he’d been doing it his whole life, but he had just charged headlong into it up to his neck.

Carl Jones, Arnold Pondletter, founder and editor of the Bastion Americana Freedom Journal, Garrisonian shit-stirrer, read weekly by millions, knew exactly what Mick had done. The fact was that Mickey Malloy, poster child for crossing the line, had attacked a private citizen’s home under the Office’s authority and in direct defiance of a Congressional order.

“Oh my goodness, I cannot wait to sic my lawyers on you,” Pondletter cackled. “You’ve gone and buried yourself, Malloy. I’ll be out of whatever gulag you throw me in by tomorrow morning. Worst thing you’ll do for me is ruin a night’s sleep. But you? I stroke a few keys and you’ll get torn to pieces in the street. Sounds fair to me.”

Jones was right. The sneering propagandist pushed the Slugger’s bat aside and stepped into Mick’s face, his hands held out, ready for cuffs:

“Let’s get moving, boys, it stinks in here and I need to make my phone call.”

“You know, if I was half as bad as you write about me no one would ever know what happened to you,” Mick growled.

“Lucky for me, you think the rules matter,” Jones replied. “But all that matters is who is still there when the dust settles. And I plan to be on their side.”

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.