Copyright © 2010 Lorelie Brown
All rights reserved — a Samhain Publishing, Ltd. publication
Micah Trent rolled up his shirtsleeves. Halfway down the narrow block, housed in a squat building, their target had darkened windows and a plain wooden door. No sign proclaimed it the Wet Your Whistle, but their intelligence should be good. A trio of rough-hewn workers spilled out, walking wobbly. Drunk from all appearances, and in public. One started singing “Danny Boy” and his companions merely slapped him on the back, sending him stumbling into a street lamp.
Pulling back around the corner, Micah cocked a brow at Jacob Sterling. “You want to tell me why we’re bothering with a lousy little joint like this?”
“Would if I could, hot shot.”
“I’m serious. We’re after bigger fish. We don’t have time to chase after a guppy like this place. Every minute we waste here is one we could be chasing one of the mob families.”
Jake only shrugged and tucked his thumbs in his suspenders. “You don’t have to tell me twice. We go where we’re ordered. Maybe the owner didn’t pay his protection money.”
“Not funny,” Micah gritted.
“But true.”
The real malarkey was, it could be true. Micah glanced at the four uniformed officers who were supposed to be his and Jake’s back up. They stared back with thinly veiled sneers of dislike. Another team waited at the other end of the block, along with Murphy and Edwards, two more Prohibition Bureau Agents. Micah had chosen them because they were a pair of the handful of agents who were neither bribable nor among the bumbling idiots who’d earned their positions by virtue of having a well-placed father or uncle.
The Boston cops didn’t like the Prohibition Agency, didn’t see the point, and especially despised being forced to help out. The same dislike echoed in the faces of local cops in every one of the big cities he and Jake bounced around.
He fixed Sergeant Raels, the leader of the local Boston uniforms, with the no-nonsense gaze that had served him well in situations like these before. “You know what the signal is, right?”
“Sure we know it,” Raels smirked. Left unspoken was the fact that they’d like to ignore it. He fingered a fat brass uniform button. “That red flag of your partner’s there. Though we were thinking maybe it should be white. Seems a bit more fitting.”
“Jake, what did I do to the last local who gave us trouble?” He didn’t take his eyes off the Sergeant.
“Wasn’t pretty. Didn’t the doctors say he’d never have children?” With an instinct born of years of partnership, Jake played along without a bobble.
“Now, now, that’s an exaggeration.” He flashed his biggest, most charming smile, the same one he’d used the night before when he’d tried to talk the head Prohibition Agent for the region out of this raid. Sergeant Raels, however, went gratifyingly pale. “They said he might never have children. Big difference.”
“The difference that kept your job, if I remember right.” Jake leaned his heavy shoulders against a brick wall.
“I find I’ve been getting a little bored lately in this line of work. Might be time for a change.”
“If you say so.”
“But you won’t force me to make that choice, will you, Sergeant Raels? You’ll be quite observant and see the signal, right?”
“No, sir.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed repeatedly. “That is, yes, sir. We’ll see it.”
With a tip of his chin, Jake signaled to step away, out of earshot, and Micah followed. “You’re not making us any friends,” his partner said.
“I’m not sure that I care. And at any rate, they’ll get the job done now. We can rely on them.”
“At least until they get away long enough to realize we ain’t got any real authority over them.”
Another uncomfortable truth. Federal Agents were on their own unless a local chief felt like lending support out of the goodness of his heart. Or because the usual bribes had been forgotten. Prohibition Agents enforced the Volstead Act, the federal law that propped up the Eighteenth Amendment. Local chiefs only had to be concerned with state laws, which were sometimes much more lax than the Volstead Act.
“How do I look?” he asked, in an attempt to deflect Jake’s line of conversation. “Will I do?”
The Wet Your Whistle catered to the dockworkers that populated the area, so they both wore work pants with homemade, plain shirts and exposed suspenders. Jake eyed him and gave a snort of disbelief. On the shorter side, and with muscles that came from a hard life, Jake looked right at home in his clothes.
“Be damned if I know how you manage to look like some high flying sheik in a get up like that.” He reached out and roughly tousled Micah’s hair. “I suppose that’ll do. Try not to look so sharp.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tuck my brain away in my shoe.”
“Wise ass.”
“You know it.” With one more warning glance at the uniformed officers, Micah and Jacob ambled off down the street and entered the Wet Your Whistle as casually as if they did it every day at quitting time.
All conversation dribbled to a halt like the last dregs from a keg of beer, as the pair stood in the doorway and looked around. The bar was a small, square room jam packed with dark wood tables and chairs. There wasn’t much in the way of decoration, just a few fading pictures of prizefighters and the tricolor flag of Ireland tacked up behind the bar, which covered the left wall. Most of the tables were filled with workers, except for one conveniently by the front door. They’d pretend to move to sit there, while really making an exit. Gin joint owners tended to get unreasonably anxious if a man bought a pint and then headed immediately for the door. Micah made a tiny gesture toward it and was comforted to know Jake would understand him implicitly. One of the benefits of working together for five years.
As they made their way to the bar, men watched with distrust in their eyes, their hands wrapped around earthenware mugs. The air wound thick with the dual tangs of hard-working men and beer. After years in his job, Micah could pick out the specific smell of alcohol no matter what it was mixed with.
Behind the bar were two people, a man and a woman. The man eyed them with the same straight-faced distrust as the rest of the patrons, while the woman wore an open smile. Probably an easier mark, she sat on a stool, knitting a cream-colored bit of fluff.
Micah sidled up to the bar in front of the man. “Set us up, will ya, mate?”
The man stretched his lips into what was supposed to be a smile and ran a hand over his pale, thinning hair. “Would that be tea or coffee?”
“Ah now, you know we need something stronger than that after a long day.”
“Then it’ll be coffee.”
“Bobby MacAfee said this was the place to come to.” Bobby was the snitch who sang on the Wet Your Whistle after being taken up on hijacking charges, but this pair wouldn’t know that. Micah winked at the lady, who flushed red and dropped a stitch. “Good drink and even better company.”
“Coffee or tea?”
“Relax, Willie,” said the woman. “They seem like a good sort to me.”
“Margie, I don’t know them from Adam,” replied Willie, in a cranky grumble.
“We’ll never be building this place up if you don’t relax.”
A heavy stone lodged in Micah’s gut. These two were the ones who seemed like a good sort. He sure didn’t feel like a good anything, unless it was a goodly asshole. Micah thrived on the prospect of going after the big-time bootleggers and the mobs that used alcohol to fuel their larger criminal ventures. Taking out the mom and pop establishments made him feel about an inch tall. He ought to be talking a mile a minute, convincing Willie to sell him some booze. It was his job, his responsibility in their partnership, while Jake made sure no one snuck up behind them.
He couldn’t force out a single word.
Instead, Willie caved under his wife’s raised eyebrows and gentle smile. Grumbling under his breath, he fumbled around under the bar and produced two mugs. He set them down hard on the counter and they sloshed, spilling amber beer on the nicked and scarred surface. Micah wanted to sigh. Instead, he forced a congenial smile.
“Thanks, bub.” Jake picked up a mug, and then made his way to the empty table they’d spotted. But instead of sitting to enjoy his drink, Jake yanked a weighted scarf from his back pocket, opened the door and tossed it out. It arched slowly over the dimmed street then fluttered to the ground. Willie, Margie, and the patrons all watched it, dumbfounded.
“What the hell?” Willie muttered.
“Sorry my good man.” Micah vaulted the bar, even as he yanked his badge out of a back pocket. “This is a raid.”
Willie tried to run, making for the end of the bar and Margie, but Micah hooked a foot around the man’s ankle and slung an arm around his shoulders. At the same time, he pinned Willie’s wrist to his back and lowered the man as gently as he could. Still, he went down like a felled oak, slamming against the plain wood floor with a resounding thunk.
The stupefaction snapped and chaos reigned. Men made for the back exits, yelling and pushing as they tried to escape. Chairs and tables crashed to the floor and earthenware shattered. Margie screamed and cringed on her stool, clapping her hands to her ears as agents and officers poured through the front door.
“Lemme go, mister. I wasn’t bothering no one. I run a quiet place,” Willie moaned, his voice smothered in the floor.
“You’ll be charged with illegally selling alcohol in violation of the Volstead Act.”
“They’d have all found another place to drink. I was just trying to make a good life for Margie and me. I don’t sell nothing but beer and a little watered rum.”
Micah sighed and slapped a pair of cuffs on Willie. Above their heads, the police sounded like they were cracking skulls. No punishment could be applied to the drinkers, but at raids, they ran like rats from a sinking ship and got rowdy while they were at it. “It’s still against the law.”
Edwards appeared at the open end of the bar. Tall and skinny, with sallow skin, the man had on his customary unpleasant expression. “Not much here. A few barrels of beer, a couple cases of liquor in a store room.”
Micah did a quick appraisal of the shelf to his right as he rose to his feet. He levered Willie up to a standing position. “Even less up here.”
“Not worth our time,” Edwards complained.
“Orders are orders,” he said as he led Willie around the counter and through the room. “You know what to do.”
Margie was already outside, sitting on the curb, and Micah gestured for Willie to sit next to her. “You’re both under arrest and this place is gonna be padlocked.”
“I just wanted a good life for us.” Willie hunched over his sobbing wife as she nestled into his shoulder. “Weren’t no one hurt.”
“You broke the law,” Micah said, but he found he couldn’t look directly at the couple.
Instead, he watched Edwards direct the uniforms in the alcohol disposal. Two officers hatched open the barrels of beer, which foamed and spewed their contents into the street. Edwards cracked bottles of rum into the gutter, and they broke in a crystalline chorus singing about the uselessness of it all.
A raid on one of the big mobs was something he could get behind. Mob bosses were prime example of ruthless lawlessness, ordering killings the same way some men ordered a steak for dinner.
But neither Micah nor Jake had been able to find an edge in on one of the carefully guarded men in months, not since their last big sting operation in St. Louis. Instead they were forced into these pointless, small-time raids that barely made a dent in the flow of alcohol through America’s streets.
“Hey, wait!” Willie called, as Micah started to walk away. “What if I had some information?”
Micah pivoted on his heel and stalked back to the watery-eyed couple. “About who?”
“Johnny Vittorelli. Down in New York. Poppa Paulo’s son.” Willie sang like a canary, but it didn’t look comfortable on him. His mouth screwed up into a flat line and his eyes darted every which way.
Johnny Vittorelli wouldn’t be much of a prize on his own. But if they could use him to get to his big-time mobster father, that was a whole new ballgame. “Start talking. We’ll see what kind of a deal your information’s worth.”
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