FRANK JAGGER Gang Wars part 4

Copyright (c) 2020 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

FRANK JAGGER

GANG WARS

Part 4

The rattling flat-bed Ford dropped us off in front of the farm house, and then disappeared in a cloud of dust. If we weren’t hired, it would be a long walk back to Chicago. Beth wore a dirty gingham dress with a clean white apron that clung to her in places like a nervous coat of paint. The out-of-work farmhand I’d become was dressed in torn bib-overalls, broken-lace boots that could talk with a little persuasion and a hat that had to have been stolen from a mule. My hands were covered with blisters from chore practice and I still didn’t know a chicken coop from a shoe shine stand. I was convinced these Cleveland mobsters holding Albert McGooganheimer’s daughter and my missing secretary would see through our ruse instantly and that we’d be shot on sight. For some reason, I kept thinking about the taste of Old Forester Bourbon.

Three men in pinstripe suits answered my knock on the splintered wood door and two of them held forty-fives almost concealed behind their backs. I let Beth do the talking. “That store woman in Collinsville says you’re looking for two people to tend your sick folks and do farm chores,” she said.

“We’ll talk care of my … parents,” the goon in front said. He was looking at me suspiciously. “We need people to run this farm … and keep away visitors.”

“What’s them fields planted in?” I looked behind me and around with wide eyes. I sounded extra stupid … even to my own ears.

“Horseradish!” one of the men said. The gun in his hand was now visible. “What else do they grow around here?”

“Is that a duck gun?” I yodeled, pointing at the Colt .38 Special in his hand. “Can you teach me how to aim it?”

“I’m Vincent,” the mobster in front smiled and the guns vanished from the men behind him. “These are my brothers … Slim and Tony. There’s a cook-stove with pans and utensils in the barn. I’ll have Tony bring you out some sugar and flour.  You can sleep in the hayloft. This house is off limits. Do your work … and we’ll get along just fine!”

“Will we be paid?” I stammered.

“We’ll see,” Vincent said. “Forget about them horseradish fields … we got us a bug infestation … and we’re planning to burn them.”

One of the goons was frisking Beth with his eyes. If he moved, he was in danger of stepping on his tongue. “Thank you so much,” I told the mobsters. “You won’t be sorry!”

-------2-------

The farm’s previous owners were into raising beef, possibly to hide the taste of all that horseradish.  At least two hundred head of bawling Black Angus steers were crowded into a too small corral without grass or water. A tired plow-horse leaned against an outhouse. I finally got the cattle moved into a bigger pasture, forked them some hay and filled all their drinking troughs. It was suppertime when I trudged back to the barn.

Biddies are harder to catch than you’d think. By the time I cornered two hens; I’d lost at least five pounds, wore a sweaty jacket of feathers and was famished. Beth grew up on a farm and cooked the birds along with corn and other vegetables plucked from a parched-garden. After we ate, my secretary’s sister decided to take a plate of fried chicken up to the mob hideout … just to get a look inside.

            There was a half-starved hound sharing the barn with us and I fed and watered him while I waited for Beth to return.

-------3-------

            Beth came back more than an hour later. Her blouse was torn and a couple of her buttons were missing. I was stomping toward the farm house when she stopped me. There are eight men inside. All of them are ready to shoot ducks.” She smiled. “Well I guess there are now just seven hunters still on their feet. I’ve learned a few tricks working at the Horn Section. I think these thugs will leave the one who tore my blouse behind when they go. Tony wants to be a farmer now. He’s moaning on a cot in the back room … crying over the two acres I just gifted him.”

            “Do you have any idea where they’re holding your sister and Lynette McGooganheimer?”

            “I’m sure they’re locked in a small cellar under the back bedroom. I heard two women’s voices whispering below me as Tony tried to persuade me to make his bed.”

            “Any chance of breaking them out?”

            “The only entrance is through a trap door in the living room.”

She started to leave. “Where are you going?”

            “To wash off the drool,” she said looking for a clean towel. “I feel like I’ve been locked in a cage with a baboon.”

-------4------

            It was like a scene from a Gary Cooper western. Beth mounted the plow horse with her boots firmly in the stirrups of a moth eaten saddle. “There’s only one way around the house once the gate is open!” She handed me a broken hay-rake handle with coal-oil soaked rags tied around the top and tucked another one just like it behind her.  “You stand over there and keep any strays from going around the house,” she ordered.

            Five minutes later, I heard what sounded like a storm approaching at a fast pace. Beth rode behind the herd waving her torch and turning the panicked cattle into a stampede. The Bell Cow was racing in front with its tail on fire. I found out later it was the only way Beth could get the bovine leader to move. Eight hundred hoofs pounding the ground was enough to make the old farm house shake. Vincent and Slim stumbled out on the porch just as the herd charged through the open gate. I lit my torch and began to wave it in the air. Both men on the porch fired their guns. The stampede suddenly turned in my direction and I lit a pile of oil-soaked wood beside me.

It was hard to see what was happening with all the dust and flying wood splinters. The first twenty cows crashed into the porch and broke away the supports. The next one hundred tore down the front wall and thundered through the living room wearing the shake-roof like a wooden hat. An explosion somewhere started an enormous fire. There were screams and a couple more gunshots. I heard cursing in Italian and caught a glimpse of Beth as she rode past. I’d never seen such excitement and pleasure in one person’s eyes. She looked orgasmic. By the time the last cow ran through the ruins, the farm house was just a smoldering scrap pile. The thugs were all dead, and we could hear two female voices crying for help beneath the debris.

-------5------

            McGooganheimer’s men arrived in minutes and helped us move the wreckage. My secretary was the first one out and she screamed at me. “What the hell?”  Lynette McGooganheimer crawled out after Linda. She was covered with soot but was still more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.

            The three women went into the barn to clean up while me and Machine Gun’s men dragged the smoldering bodies from the ashes searched and then buried them behind a pig pen.

            Later Linda found me alone while I was rolling a cigarette in the garden. “I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this,” she said. “Lynette and I have been lovers for more than a year!” I tore the cigarette I was rolling … and had to start over. “We knew her father would never approve of our relationship, so we planned an elaborate honeymoon-escape to the Mediterranean. We thought he would eventually stop looking for us if he thought it was just another mob-abduction.” She went on. “It was me that typed the ransom note on your typewriter. We booked passage on a cruise ship, but our travel-agent was one of Joey Lenardo’s associates. His men lured us into one of their taxis in order to extort her father.”

            I felt sorry for Linda when she looked at me with her help-me eyes. There was more than ten grand that Machine Gun’s men took off the bodies before they were buried. I made them give all the dough to Lynette. No one complained. I told them both to remember the Titanic and to count life boats before they boarded any ship. I watched them drive away sitting next to each other in one of McGooganheimer’s cars.

-------6-------

            The driver dropped Beth off at her apartment. She complained she smelled like smoke and I daydreamed about her soaking in a tub filled with bubbles. We drove right past the office where I occasionally slept. “McGooganheimer wants to see you … now,” the driver explained. My dreams were chased away by a growing sense of doom. Machine Gun would of course demand to know why his precious daughter hadn’t been returned to him.

            There were at least twenty guards with tommy guns guarding the gates to his magnificent estate. The Chicago gang wars of 1929 were evidentially still very popular with mobsters. Two men escorted me into McGooganheimer’s enormous office then closed the door behind us. It was like I was being locked in my own cage … this time with a tiger.

            The most notorious killer in Chicago lit a cigar and then stared at me for a full minute before he spoke. The silence was creeping up on me like a Sicilian neck-tie salesman and I was wearing a sweaty shirt. “Where is she?” he finally asked.

            “I helped rescue Lynette from her captors,” I told him. “With all the buildings getting blown down in the Windy City by the big bad wolfs …” I hoped he didn’t think I included him. “We figured she needed a vacation … at least until this dark fairy tale ends. She’s on a cruise ship under an assumed name and with my very capable secretary along to … guard her.”

            McGooganheimer stared at me for another full minute. I had the distinct feeling that he knew all about his lesbian daughter. I could almost feel the knife sliding across my throat.

            “Make sure her vacation remains a secret,” he said, reaching into his desk drawer and tossing me a fat envelope … filled with pictures of Andrew Jackson.

-------Post-------

Machine Gun didn’t spring for the ride back to my home so I took a cab. On the way back a black sedan pulled up next to us and shot out all our tires. Another car chased them away. I heard gunfire and saw the explosion about a block away.

An hour later, the hallway that led to my office was the same twenty bucks a month cockroach hotel … but this time it smelled strongly like lavender. I thought it was my imagination until I pushed on the door … it was unlocked.

Beth lounged in a large bathtub filled with hot water and was popping bubbles with a hat-pin right in front of my desk. I don’t know how she got the heavy cast iron tub and the heated water up two flights of stairs; she was obviously into some kind of magic.

            “I hear you’re looking for a secretary.” She smiled and my heart danced the Charleston.

            “You must be a mind reader.”

            “Only the bestsellers.”

            “Can you type?”

            “Almost eight words a minute,” she said, “when I’m wearing my glasses.”

            “You won’t need glasses.”

            “You smell like a hobo camp!” Her nose wrinkled. “I don’t work for dirty old men … you’ll have to clean up your act!” She slid to one side of the bathtub.

 … and I locked my office door.

THE END ?