The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Broken Fixers, Part 4 of 4

Mickey Malloy’s big plans have gone the way a lot of them do: right down the crapper. A spy blew up, in a very literal way, his attempt to form a united front against Axis incursions in the United States’ underworld and now he has to clean up the mess. Those few survivors, criminal and official alike, are left with a choice: stick their necks out and stay in the crossfire or turtle in and getting bombed out later.

Either way, they and Mickey are in for a hell of a time.

This is Part 4 of The Case the Broken Fixers. If you’d like to avoided spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, and 3 first.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 4, 1943
LUNDMEYER SANITARIUM AND HOSPITAL
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

“Here you go,” the doctor said as he snipped the last stitch to close Mickey's oozing scalp. The young physician sat down and washed his bloody hands in a bowl of cold water, dried them on his pants, then lit up a pair of cigarettes. His held one out for Mickey. “And here you go.”

Mick graciously took the one he offered.

“Thanks,” he said. The doctor's brand was flavorful and complex, a blend of six different Virginia tobacco strains, and must've cost forty cents a pack. Mick knew he couldn't get used to such luxury, but it wasn't every day that a roto-copter blade nearly took his block off. He reached up and gingerly touched the stitches. They were uniform and tight. “You do good work, doc.”

“I should, after all the other practice you brought me,” the doctor replied. He leaned back and took a long drag on his cigarette. Mick followed suit. The doctor slowly exhaled, then said: “They say these things will kill you.”

“So can a lot of things,” Mick grunted.

“That's what I gather,” the doctor replied. “Was this really the krauts?”

“Who told you that?”

“A young Jew with a shard of glass through his eardrum,” the doctor replied.

“Probably in shock, doc,” Mick mumbled. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood, stretching his battered bones. His hand automatically went for his flask, still half-full of warm bourbon. He unscrewed the cap a took a swig.

“I wouldn't recommend any more than six drinks per day, you don't want to thin what blood you have left.”

“Tastes like back sweat anyway.” Mickey screwed the cap back on and slipped it back in his pocket.

“You mind?” the doctor asked.

“You need it more than I do,” Mick replied. His handed the flask to the young man. The doctor had been suturing officials and criminals for hours. If anyone deserved a drink, it was him. The sawbones took one slug and almost doubled over coughing. Mickey didn't spring for the fancy hooch. “Back sweat, what did I tell you?”

The doctor nodded, his face pained and screwed up like he'd just sucked a year-old lemon. Mickey clapped him on the shoulder and took his flask back.

He left the doctor in the exam room and went looking for Earp. Four dozen men and women were laid up in every corner of the hospital. Those who survived were burned, shot, crushed, and lacerated. Those who died had gotten it worse.

Before they’d bundled him off to the hospital, Mick had helped sift through the wreckage of the rubber plant while he bled. The corpses were ash held together by crystallized bones and waxy fat. Governor Ingalls had taken a gut-full of the I-A grenade's exotic energies. His bulbous body had inflated like a balloon as his innards evaporated, then been sucked tight to his skeleton and baked into a cindery leather. The old Texan's beady eyes had wrinkled and shrunk into their sockets like a pair of raisins. Mick only identified him by his bolo tie.

“Rough way to go,” Mick had muttered to himself.

“Too quick for a Nazi sympathizer,” Sigal Bat snorted. Her neck was crusty with brown blood, none of it her own. One of her brothers-in-arms was lying next to Ingalls. The dead man's silver Star of David had fused into his sternum.

“He might have just been a contrary windbag,” Mick muttered. He knew the truth, that a two-face Nazi agent had manipulated the Texan to worm her agenda through his organization. Didn't mean he wasn't a real asshole, too. Sigal couldn't see it that way, even with the man as dead as her comrade. Mick knew what Ingalls' death meant, though: to the krauts, every man, woman, and child not willing to unconditionally submit was merely an obstacle in desperate need of killing.

Nazis did not suffer half-measures.

Mick then left the Jewish commando to her mourning. He didn’t quit turning over bricks ‘til he was sure that none of the bodies left were breathing. By then he could barely stand. So much blood had soaked into his temporary bandage that it had dragged itself halfway down his face. The humid air stung at his open gash like a wasp.

Mick let the sawbones take charge for a while. The cycle of killing was wearing him down from the inside. They shot him up with a syringe full of nightmares, and Mick fell asleep hard.

Unwelcome memories curdled his dreams, turning them into something rotten and toxic. Old sights and sounds and smells flashed before him, hot and relentless. Inhuman howls echoing off Gothic catacombs melded with the sound of thundering pistons within the bowels of a vast ship which melted into the snarls of a silver-skinned goblin with a whirring knife. Squirming hordes of wriggling cockroaches scratched at his throat. Vile gases rasped his skin red. A white bird pierced with green arrows died at the foot of a purple tree. A young woman's blonde scalp peeled back to show her wet skull under the light of flickering black candles. The taste of calcified human tongue chalked his lips. Black shadows screamed out of the sun to slice skin and drink blood.

Mickey came to more exhausted than when he went to sleep, scratching at his forehead. He’d seen his fair share of hospitals and gurneys, he knew where he was.

His knobby fingers worked the old barbed wire scar he'd picked up in Germany. It was another hour of sweaty tossing and turning before the young doctor showed to sew him shut, but Mick didn't mind. He needed time to get his head right, and he understood the concept of triage better than most.

As Mickey staggered down the hall of the old mental hospital, the doctor's expensive smoke trailed behind him like a genie's tail. He ran his fingertips across the fresh stitches once more. Evenly-spaced and uniform, tighter than a corset.

A radio crackled nearby and Mick staggered over to lean in the doorway of the orderlies’ break room.

“Again, reports are coming in that a criminal cabal was just last night broken up through the efforts of concerned patriots,” the nasally man squawked through the scratchy speakers. Mick knew the voice: Father Charles Coughlin, a vicious anti-Semite and all-around asshole promoting the new Garrisonian bullshit while hiding behind his vestments. “Word from heroes on the ground in Florida confirm that a large criminal conspiracy was disrupted through private efforts. We have also confirmed that this plot was organized by the recently unmasked Office for the Cataloguing of Unusual Occurrences and that they fought with deadly vigor to maintain their machinations. Now you folks know that I’m not one to often invoke the name of the Great Deceiver, but I can smell the brimstone wafting off this from - !”

“Cut that crap off!” Mick shouted, startling the orderlies and sending a lightning bolt through his molars. He couldn’t listen to another word from that snake. The men cut off the broadcast and looked at each other, obviously waiting for him to wander on before they started whispering. He’d probably confirmed everything that quisling had been saying.

“Damn it,” he muttered and lurched away. Sure enough, the flurry of hushed discussion started up the second his back was turned. He stumbled down the hallway until the sound of familiar voices startled him. Mick pushed open an ajar door to his left.

“He walks,” Uncle Gio croaked. The fat don was sprawled in a cushioned chair. Earp and Capano were with him, along with the Lanes. Alex was standing, but his brother was leaned back in a chair, balancing an ice pack on his goose-egged forehead.

A dozen tabs of white tape held Earp's face together. He smiled when Mickey pushed the door open, crinkling the tape.

“Mick,” he said, “We were having a drink.”

“Great minds,” Mickey replied. He tossed his half-killed flask to Alex, who unscrewed it and took a quick swig. His face twisted up at the flavor like he'd found half a worm in his apple.

“Is this what keeps you young, Malloy?” he asked. His brother put his hand out, grasping for the flask, but Alex slapped it away. “You heard the doctor, no booze. I'll take your drink for you.”

“Christopher has a moderate concussion,” Earp explained. “My wounds are superficial, Mister Capano twisted his ankle, and Uncle Gio has a bone bruise and suffered from smoke inhalation.”

“You're all in one piece then?” Mick asked. He put his hands out and Alex tossed the flask back.

“We suffered heavy casualties. Eighteen officials dead, twelve more wounded, three of which will not be able to return to field work, one of which will never walk again. This attack was the greatest loss the Office has felt in its entire history,” Earp answered. “Those amongst our tentative allies that survived either do not trust us or think us incompetent, placing this on us either way.”

“We have a mole,” Chris groaned from under the ice pack.

“No, we don't,” Mickey said quietly. Earp stared at him.

“You think they could have cracked our communication systems?” the inspector asked. His furrowed brow crinkled the medical tape even further. A cut re-opened above his eyebrow, and red beads bloomed.

“Nope, it’s far dumber than that,” Mick replied. He sighed and told them about Ingalls' woman in blue. None of them had noticed her escape in the chaos.

“I think it was Liesl Fremde,” Mick concluded. For officials, hers was a household name: the Abwehr's infamous face-stealing black widow. “Losa was the primary, her exfil was secondary. I saw her pull off her disguise once they had her on the truck.”

“Who is Liesl Fremde?” Uncle Gio coughed. He picked up a fresh chianti and slurped it until his throat stopped hurting.

“We call her the Woman with the Double-Jointed Face,” Chris said.

“The Shadow Bride,” Alex added.

“An assassin and spy who can manipulate her physical appearance at will,” Mick explained. “The krauts must have been in the middle of turning the Texans when we called them to the meeting. They would have had her squirm into Ingalls'... ahem, good graces, then pass Department Three every detail about the meet as the governor received them. That is how she does it.”

“God, they could be anyone,” Earp sighed. “Hell, between Fremde and Eizhürst we already got two spies who can change their faces to whatever they want. Then this Schmidt? Everyone who’s seen ‘Schmidt’ gives a different description.”

“Their wig budget must be through the roof,” Chris grunted,

“I have heard the name from men from all over this country,” Mick said. “Every organization in there tonight had been approached by him. Every one.”

“That’s a lot of travel for one guy to not get caught,” Uncle Gio pointed out.

“That’s what I’m getting at,” Mick said. “I think that there’s a whole troop of Schmidts out there, recruiting. They only bring in Eizhürst when they need the big guns.”

“That’s an interesting theory, Mick,” Earp said.

That hung in the room for a long while. None of them wanted to weigh in on Mick’s hypothesis. If he was wrong, there was a vicious killer criss-crossing the country with impunity. If he was right, there was a whole cadre of enemy agents operating right under their noses.

“Well when my Schmidt came to Chicago, I turned him away at the door, threatened to plug 'em,” Uncle Gio offered.

“And at least Ingalls didn't marry Fremde first, not like Whiskey Dixon did,” Chris snickered. Mick's face screwed up at the jab at Clay Dixon. He and the Navy man went back a long ways, and Dixon was said to have taken the revelation of her identity poorly. 'Shot at her on the way out the door' poorly. Alex saw Mickey's reaction and punched his wounded brother in the arm.

“Damn,” Chris yelped, rubbing the feeling back into his bicep.

“He's never going to tell us about it, now,” Alex snapped.

“About what?” Mick asked.

“Don't bother him about that,” Earp hissed, shutting up the squabbling siblings.

“About what?” Mick grunted. He took another slug from his flask.

“You might say we're students of the Falkenstein raid,” Alex offered. Bourbon nearly blew out of Mickey's nose.

“Students?” Mick choked.

“We studied the op, prep to exfil,” Chris told him. “We read everything we hold get our hands on, newspaper articles to Most Secret debriefs. Every autopsy and prisoner interview.”

“Then you know enough not to ask me about it,” Mick growled.

“There's a lot that went on in that castle that we could learn from,” Alex objected.

“Then ask Halistone, or the Snowman. Ask Chiron or Dixon or Gonzales. Ask any of them but me.” Mick was seething. “You know what? You want to know what it was all about? Ask Harold Queen, or Axel Maes. Ask Admiral Desrochers about his dad. Find that Vichy piece of garbage Lecuyer and ask him about Falkenstein.”

“They didn’t mean anything, Mick,” Earp implored. Mickey glared at him.

“Men that just watched eighteen comrades get gunned down should see war as anything but academic,” Mickey huffed. He was tomato red.

“I wouldn't be so sure that the cowboy didn't get hitched to the double-faced broad,” Capano cut in. He'd seen awful shit, just like Mick. That's why he wore a mask, too, and why he changed the subject back to one Mick could think about. “You see the rock that dame was lugging around on her finger? That thing could choke a goat.”

“So her play was to lock down the border?” Earp asked the room, latching onto Capano’s distraction and running with it. Mick took a breath and let them reel him in:

“The Abwehr turned Losa's crew in Florida out from under him. That got them the east coast. When the Cuban starting taking offense to that, he had to go. With the Montuosos, they got the Great Lakes and the biggest hub in the midwest,” he said.

Uncle Gio took offense to his last point.

“We coulda fought them off like the old days, but you lot took Putter and all our hitters back to the old country. We don't have the manpower to keep our territory, much less take theirs,” the fat mafioso complained, as if the Office wanted an open mob war on American streets.

“If Fremde had succeeded in turning the Texans for him, the Abwehr would've had unimpeded access to the east coast, the northern border, and the entire southern border,” Earp realized. “They'd be able to move anything and anyone into this country at will.”

“Cascade,” Mick muttered. Capano and Uncle Gio looked him like he was crazy, and Mickey locked his jaw shut. He was no good at the subterfuge game. He’d made Earp listen to his interview with Hexmacher, and forced him to read over everything he, Beasley, and Tremblay had put together from radio intercepts, double agents in domestic fascist groups, weapons shipment tracking, and third-hand intel gleaned from stir-crazy Grave residents.

Still, Earp found it too big and too convenient. A country-wide conspiracy to destabilize the government via the underworld? A meet-up to request gangsters’ eyes and ears was one thing, but Mick was talking about the Abwehr mobilizing a domestic terrorist army for direct action. Until the night before, the Axis had never attempted such a thing. Sure, they had agents and hitters, but nothing so open, so organized.

With the Bloody Dawn, they’d given up on hiding. What the attack on the meet told Mick was that the krauts and their pets weren’t going to hide anymore. They were networked, and they knew they had a million other nuts on their side.

They were going to be bold, and things were only going to get worse.

“So what do we do now?” Chris asked from under his ice pack.

“We wait, we watch, we stay vigilant,” Earp said. “They’ve escalated their use of the Silver Legion. We crack down on them and see who else we can flush out.”

“I'll make some calls,” Mick said. He wanted every known Legion compound and safe house burning. Everyone from Eisenhower to the local mailman would be hunting them down.

“The Inspector General has already taken control of the situation,” Earp told him. Mick's cauliflower ears turned red. The alliances had had fought for, that people had died for, were not the kind Chip Klavin was willing to make. Mick was building up to launch into his ‘enemies-of-enemies’ tirade before Alex Lane interrupted that barreling freight train of thought:

“What do you think those Schmidts are going to do with Losa?”

Alex ignored the look Earp gave him for using that name in plural. Mick's mind flipped a one-eighty and he looked up to see the room waiting for an answer from him.

He thought about that for a long moment. He had personally known Lobo Losa for years, and had harried his organization as a cop, a P.I., and a Bastard for close to a decade.

The man could make rivals into allies and could put a bullet through a friend's teeth. He'd fought his way off the streets of Havana to the carnal houses and card dens of Florida. Losa was tough as old leather and sharper than a straight razor. Lobo, the wolf, he would not break.

Eizhürst, on the other hand, was not a negotiator. His resolve was sharper than his knives. Losa could hold out for a while, but eventually the pain would be too much. He was a ship rat: he could ride out any storm knowing that he could always swim away once the ship went down. Thing was, the Nazis would never let him see land.

Mickey sighed audibly. He was tired, from the bones out. He finally answered Alex's question:

“Losa'd chew off his own leg if he had to. He’s a survivor. Nothing else means a thing to him.”

MONDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 9, 1943
HOLDFAST COOPERATIVE
GREEN HOLE CREEK, TENNESSEE

“How many more of these God damn rednecks are we waiting on?” Lucas Pharaoh demanded from atop his truck’s tailgate. His black suit gleamed under the moonlight, expertly cut, high fashion as far as Mick was concerned. His dark skin blended into the night, and despite their frantic labor, he hadn’t so much as scuffed his alligator shoes.

“Hold your horses, pal,” Mick grunted. The sweat of hauling moonshine stills onto flatbeds was making the stitches in the side of his head sting, and the other man’s impatience wasn’t helping.

“Word is, those cops are bringing outside help and I don’t want my guys anywhere near this place when they show,” Pharaoh said.

“Yeah, Garrisonian help,” Deputy Regional Investigator Royce Freeman added. The older Black official winced as the shifting wrinkles on his face intersected the swollen bruise on his cheek. Freeman had recently been on the wrong end of a murderous hypnotism incident and had gotten his clock cleaned to resolve it. He cupped his hands and sent an echoing shout across the wide clearing: “Let’s move! If you can’t carry it, leave it! Time to go!”

“If you ain’t loaded up in three minutes, you’re the pigs’ welcoming party!” Pharaoh yelled.

Mick watched from the edge of the clearing, a flask in one hand and a cigarette in the other. When he’d been investigating the Head Hunter murders in South Carolina, Pharaoh had organized the same kind of exodus for Gullah towns, keeping them ahead of a police lynch mob. He was the chief security officer for Agrarian Mutual Bank and staying out of sight was his specialty. He didn’t look it by his flashy suit and gold jewelry, but Pharaoh was as much a shadow as the ‘bank’ he worked for.

Another pair of loaded trucks rumbled to life and headed north, packed with distilling equipment and scowling moonshiners. When the word had come down from HYDRA that the Garrisonians were going after the Holdfast boys, Mick was forced to scramble.

“Thanks,” he muttered.

It took Pharaoh a second to peel his eyes off the last few trucks still loading.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Thanks for doing this,” Mick said. He was bone-tired and beat to Hell. He wouldn’t have been able to swing any of it.

“Don’t thank me,” Pharaoh grunted. “Boss says rescue a bunch of hillbillies, I say: ‘how high?’”

“I appreciate it anyway,” Mick replied.

“Like I said, thank the boss,” Pharaoh said. He hopped off the truck and stalked toward the remaining trucks. “Hey, move it! Time to kick rocks!”

Another pair of trucks rolled out, but the third, a canvas-topped deuce-and-a-half, was still waiting. Pharaoh went to figure out what the hold-up was.

“You know Arthur Bell ain’t going to be able to walk again,” Freeman whispered.

“That’s what I hear,” Mick replied. He took a long drag off his cigarette. The Bank’s president had taken lead in the hip and it had travelled south, obliterating his left leg. “His femur looks like a jigsaw puzzle on the X-ray.”

“God damn, after that I can’t imagine him giving us another second of time, much less honoring the alliance that got him laid out,” Freeman said. He pointed at the scrambling moonshiners and the Bank man yelling at them to speed it up. “I’d’ve never figured he’d help them out.”

“When you got enemies like Nazis, you end up with strange bedfellows,” Mick said. “But these ain’t your run-of-the-mill rednecks, you know. These folks sell ‘shine to raise money for their cause. These folks are Communists.”

The Holdfast Collective was just one of a couple dozen Appalachian socialist compounds that the Office had contacted. The old mountains contained pockets of people more concerned with helping others than just looking out for themselves, and people like the new Garrisonian Party took offense to that somehow. The Collective and their kin had heard what Hitler did to Communists in his own country and weren’t excited to see what his newest zealots would do to appease him.

“I know they’re Commies,” Freeman hissed, “That’s what I’m talking about. The Black Bank’s about as capitalist as they come. I’m telling you, before Tallahassee, Arthur Bell wouldn’t have wasted his spit if a Communist was on fire.”

“What do you know about his guys?” Mick asked. Agrarian Mutual Bank was largely a mystery to the Office. They had all their licenses and paperwork in order, but it was obvious that they had existed long before their founding date and that their extracurricular activities outstripped anything on their charter.

“I’m from North Carolina, you know. Durham. And they’ve always been around,” Freeman answered. “They filled a void. Folks like me can’t deposit money, write checks, get loans from most banks. So the Black Bank came through and carved out that space for people that just want to get by. Maybe they didn’t do it by the book at first, but that book ain’t written by or for people that look like me.”

“I get that,” Mick said. He also thought ‘carved’ might have been a little more literal than Freeman had intended, but he held his tongue. He’d seen the leg-breakers Bell had brought to the meeting, and the weaponry Lucas Pharaoh carried. A lot of Americans were down because a lot of other Americans were standing on their necks, and that wasn’t always a figure of speech. Hell, Tulsa, the Red Summer proved that a ways back, it wasn’t news. And even in the last month people were fighting in Detroit, Los Angeles, Texas, New York City. Folks were killing and dying to maintain a status quo founded on killing and dying. In Mick’s experience, the cops and legislators fought to keep things as-is, no matter how wrong things were.

If the Bank could give people a hand up when no one else was willing to reach out, well in Mick’s book that was good thing. And he sure as Hell wasn’t in any place to judge their methods.

He snorted and took a shot of warm rye. If he didn’t pay attention, he might wake up a radical one day.

“Sure, the Black Bank wasn’t exactly ‘legal’ at first,” Freeman continued, “They got their start moving money for ex-slaves, fronting businesses others wouldn’t. Once they got big enough, though, you best believe they made themselves legal. Not that they changed, but the law did. When you get their kind of swing, you can do that.”

As someone who’d lost his job at the insistence of someone with money, Mick understood that fact all too well.

“So the Black Bank, huh?” Mick asked. He’d only heard them called that a couple times, and on each occasion he had assumed it was due to the complexion of their leadership. He hadn’t considered that they’d started as a black market for financial services.

“That’s what we called ‘em when I was coming up,” Freeman said. “My father said they built towns.”

“Looks like they tear ‘em down, too,” Mick pointed out. What had been a bustling operation six hours before, with a dozen jumbo stills manned by fifteen families, was hollowed out. The Bank men worked fast. The communal hall and bunkhouse where everyone slept was practically cored, and the stills had long since hit the road. The Holdfast Collective was on their way to join up with another like-minded group in eastern Kentucky. All of them, save one last deuce-and-a-half.

“Shit!” Pharaoh shouted from the clearing. The truck roared and Mick could hear a wheel skidding, kicking up a brown spray. “This God damn mud!”

“Well, crap,” Mick muttered. It had almost gone smooth. He gathered himself from where he was leaning and made ready to amble on over. If they could jam a board or something under the wheel, that truck would be home free and he’d be well on his way to bed.

“Malloy,” Freeman said behind him. “Malloy, the trees!”

Mick looked past the stuck truck and saw headlights coming up from the east, a ton of them.

“Cops are here!” Freeman shouted. “Time to go!”

Mick pulled his club from where it had been hanging off his belt. The weight of it grounded him.

“Pharaoh!” he roared. The Bank man looked up, then spun to see what Mick was pointing at.

“I got this,” Pharaoh said. “You get the truck!”

The younger man was faster than Mick had been even in his prime and he bolted toward the eastern edge of the disassembled compound.

“Damn, son of a bitch, ass,” Mick wheezed. Even the short run across the clearing winded him. The lights were close, and Mick wouldn’t catch up before they arrived.

Whatever Pharaoh was planning on doing, he had to realize that the kind of cops the Garrisonians appealed to weren’t shy about getting down in the mud themselves.

Mick stumbled over to the truck and leaned on it for support.

“You idiot,” he gasped at Pharaoh’s distant back.

“He knows what he’s doing,” the driver said from the cab, startling Mick. “Now get this rig unstuck, I can’t outrun Keystone if I’m wallowed.”

“Okay, got it,” Mick grunted. “What’s the hold-up?”

The driver mashed the gas and the truck lurched but didn’t roll. The passenger side front tire spun in the mud, spraying Mick from his shins to his belly.

“What the hell?” he grunted.

“We got to get something under that wheel,” the driver shouted. “Grab a fence post or something.”

“I’ll find a board,” Freeman said, eying the Collective’s ramshackle cabins.

“I got this,” Mick grunted. He hefted his club. Freeman winced at the sight of it. He’d been on the wrong end of that particular piece of oak when Mick and a handful of other masked nuts had wiped the floor with a bunch of hypnotized would-be assassins.

Mick jammed his club’s angular head under the tire and then heaved upward, levering the wheel forward. Every one of his muscles strained. He felt like his stitches were going to burst out of the side of his head.

“Try now!” he wheezed. The driver hit the gas again, but the wheel still spun.

“Almost there!” the driver said.

The clearing lit up blue and scalding spotlights settled on the lone man facing them down. Pharaoh lit a cigarette as the cops piled out of their cars, shouting.

“What is he doing?” Mick gasped.

“Don’t worry about him,” the driver snapped. “We got children in here.”

Mick froze, then jumped up like a prairie dog. Sure enough, there were a couple barefoot freckled kids jammed into the truck’s cab along with their harried mother.

“Come on, Mick,” Freeman grunted. He plented himself behind the rear bumper and shoved while Mick hauled up on the club. They coordinated their efforts, inching the swamped deuce-and-a-half toward freedom.

The next time Mick looked up, Pharaoh was stubbing his cigarette out on the badge of the closest K.O.’d officer. A couple others were collapsed in the mud, while another limped away.

The golden rod in Pharaoh’s hand retracted into his sleeve with a snap. More cops piled out of their cars, pistols and shotguns in hand. They each wore silver arm bands around their biceps.

Silver Legion. The Abwehr’s efforts recruiting cops to their quisling club were paying off.

Mick braced himself. He was sure he was about to watch Pharaoh get gunned down, or worse. The assembled Legionnaires gathered and waited. The men groaning at Pharaoh’s feet collected themselves and crawled back to their comrades.

“What are they waiting for?” Mick grunted between efforts.

The rumble of an overpowered motorcycle answered his question. A single Victory pulled up between the patrol cars. Its thrumming engine wound down but its headlight stayed lit

“He can handle it!” the Bank driver insisted.

“Fine!” Mick snapped. He looked back at Freeman: “On three!”

Three came and went, but the truck stayed.

“Well, well, well,” the newcomer taunted as he swung a leg over his motorcycle and sauntered up to Pharaoh, giving him the once-over. “We got a fancy boy, here.”

Pharaoh stepped back and studied the strange man. The newcomer looked like a poster-boy Aryan, with a navy blue uniform of a design Mick had never seen before. His thick, high-collared flak jacket was also blue, saved for the spangled ‘G’ and a gleaming shield on his chest. His boots and gloves featured metal plates over his knuckles and toes. He made no move to unbutton his pistol holster or grab for the baton dangling from his hip. His face was gnarled and bullish, and when he spoke, he spoke around a knot of chewing tobacco.

“You probably know me,” he said, and spat a brown stream between him and Pharaoh. “But Hollywood, I ain’t ever seen a jigaboo like you.”

The scumbag’s voice was familiar, but Mick couldn’t place it. He hauled against his club again and felt the truck lurch ever so slightly.

“You ever seen one of ‘em done up in as suit as fancy as that?” the stranger called over his shoulder. The assembled cops chuckled at that. “Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.”

“Only pigs I see here are you boys,” Pharaoh quipped. He took one long drag on his cigarette then flicked it at the man. It bounced off his chest in a shower of red embers. The Legionnaires started shouting, only to go silent when the stranger lifted a hand.

“Son, you can’t even imagine the places a mouth like that is going to take you,” he snarled.

“Funny, your mother told me the exact same thing last night,” Pharaoh replied. Mick could imagine the smirk on his face.

“Can it, you,” the stranger snapped. Something with that nagged at Mick’s memory again. He turned his back and walked away from Pharaoh, saying: “Looks like this one’s resisting arrest.”

Four more Legionnaires rushed past him, nightsticks in hand, eager to show off.

Lucas Pharaoh struck like a snake. Gold flashed in the headlights again and, with a quartet of skull-cracking impacts, each cop dropped into the mud.

“That’s a good eye, flatfoot, I am resisting arrest,” Pharaoh chuckled.

The stranger held up a hand, keeping the furious contingent of Legionnaires back.

“You know who I am?” he asked, his voice carrying across the clearing in a growl that could curdle milk.

“I heard they call you ‘America’s Safeguard,’” Pharaoh chuckled.

“That they do,” the man confirmed, spitting again. “You know how I got that name?”

Mickey froze. He’d read all the bullshit in the Journal about Abe Allison, the poster child police officer the Garrisonian’s had declared their ‘Safeguard.’ To be frank, he’d thought the maniac scrawling articles about how get worked up enough to shoot one’s neighbors was a literary device, not a walking, talking, heavily-armed man.

The Garrisonian Party had sent their favorite boy out. They wanted to make an example out the Collective to anyone else out of line: get in goose-stepping lock-step or get bulldozed.

“Keep working,” the truck driver snapped, talking over whatever else Pharaoh and Safeguard were saying.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mick grunted. Freeman wheezed from the back bumper and Mick kept working on the dug-in front wheel. Inside the cab, the mother was whispering assurances to her kids. No one was crying, not yet. The tire spun in the trench it had dug for itself, spraying Mick down with a fresh layer of mud.

“Shit,” Mick grunted.

The clang of metal on metal distracted Mick again. Whatever back-and-forth the Bank man and the Garrisonian had going was over. Allison reared back and brought his night stick down once more, slamming it into a golden shield that had unfolded from Pharaoh’s wrist watch. The impact sent him staggering back and ignited a twisted smirk on the cop’s face.

“Nothing smart to say now?” Allison sneered.

“It does smart a bit, now that you mention it,” Pharaoh said, rolling his shoulder. His shield gleamed and rang like a gong. He grabbed its edge to muffle the reverberation.

Allison looked like he was mulling a comeback but Pharaoh’s baton was faster than the Garrisonian’s wit. He struck hard and fast, bouncing and rolling as the Allison blocked each swing. Finally, after a series of lighting blows that descended too fast for Mick to count, Pharaoh landed a solid thunk into the side of the cop’s face. Allison staggered and stayed on his feet, hunched over.

He held out his gloved hand again, keeping his men at bay.

“Pretty fast, Hollywood,” he said after a moment, he voice slightly slurred. When he straightened, the headlights illuminated his face: his cheekbone was mush and swelling had already closed his left eye. “But you’re going to have to work a lot harder than that.”

He stepped up, twirling his own night stick by its strap. Blood oozed out of mouth and trickled from the corner of his eye. He should have been down and out.

Abe Allison, Safeguard, wasn’t any normal cop: he was designed to be a Garrisonian symbol which made him an Abwehr creature and a Department Three abomination.

Pharaoh realized the fight wasn’t fair at the same time Mickey did and flicked his arm to retract his baton up his sleeve.

“That’s a fancy trick,” Safeguard said. “What traitor’s been handing out those toys?”

“‘Traitor,’” Mick grunted to himself. He leaned into his desperate efforts again. He could feel Freeman rocking the truck forward and timed his own efforts to match.

“Oh, we got folks for all kinds of things,” Pharaoh replied. “Ever seen one of these?”

A supersonic snap nearly distracted Mick, but he stayed at it.

“Get this off me!” Safeguard grunted. He was thrashing against some kind of belt pinning his arms to his sides.

Mick pulled up as hard as he could. The truck’s weight shifted. He wheezed through his teeth:

“Gun it! Now!”

The driver eased onto the gas, letting his mud-clogged tire grab Mick’s club and climb out of its rut. The truck bounced and rolled forward, suddenly free. Mick staggered out of the way before its back tires could catch him. He stumbled back, tripping over his heels of land in a puddle.

“Shit,” he muttered, like making his back match his soiled front was the worst of his problems.

“Stop them!” Safeguard grunted. Mick scrambled to his feet.

“Last train out of Dodge!” the driver shouted.

“Get those kids down!” Freeman ordered. He was up on the tailgate, hanging on like garbage man. Mick closed the distance in two strides and launched himself up onto the running board, throwing his top half through the open window to cover the mother and two kids in the cab.

Pistols and shotguns rang out, pinging lead off the rolling truck.

“Hey, pigs!” Pharaoh shouted. He was sprinting for the truck as he unhooked a canister from the inside of his coat and tossed it. An arc of yellow gas streamed out of it and began pooling on the ground and flowing across the clearing.

The Legion men shouted and bolted away, leaving Safeguard struggling.

A few more gazelle strides closed the distance and Pharaoh jumped on the running board behind Mick. He latched onto the window frame and smacked the roof.

The driver gave it some gas and they were rolling, building speed.

Safeguard roared behind them and the restraining belt snapped as loud as a failing anchor chain.

“They’re going to run us down!” Mick shouted over the howling engine. Pharaoh had to know that a deuce-and-a-half had no hope of outrunning a pack of squad cars, much less a motorcycle.

“Ever heard of firefog?” Pharaoh called back. Mick had. When a forest needed to get burned down quick, fast, and in a hurry, firefog was the Office’s first choice. It was supposed to have stayed under wraps. He didn’t want to consider how, or why, the Bank had its hands on some.

“This ain’t poison!” a Legionnaire realized seconds later.

“Stop!” Safeguard yelled, and Mick knew he wasn’t talking to them.

The Legionnaires’ first shot ran out and was instantly consumed as the sticky, flammable firefog gas ignited in a furious fireball. Orange bathed the holler, stuttering behind the trees like an off-speed film. Flames blossomed above the canopy, drowning out the country stars for a few seconds.

The truck bounced so hard it nearly threw Mick off the side, but then they were on a gravel road. The driver churned into third gear and they were moving.

Mickey dragged himself out of the cab and into the open air. Inside, the woman was cradling her children. Still no tears. He smiled.

“Thanks for everything,” Mick said, letting the wind carry his voice to Pharaoh.

“My pleasure,” he replied. “Give me a call any time you got any ignorant peckerwoods in need of attitude adjustments.”

“You better stay by your phone,” Mick grumbled. His workload wasn’t looking to lighten any time soon.

“Besides, it wasn’t all charity,” Pharaoh added with a grin that showed off a gold tooth, “Who do you think’s fronting these folks ‘til they get back up and running?”

“Great,” Mick muttered. It wasn’t enough that he had was rescuing Commie bootleggers from Nazi cop-impersonators, he had to coordinate deals between gun runners and the Mafia while lining up a new vig for military-armed loansharks.

Things were upside down, and turning it right-side up would not work. No, he’d have to keep going wherever the insanity led him, all the way around and through until he’d gone so far that everything looked right again.

His stitches ached.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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