The Death Of Jack Hamilton (20)

“There he goes again,” Johnnie says. “He needs a doc, Homer, and
you’re the boy who has to find one.” “Jesus, Johnnie, this ain’t my town!” “Doesn’t matter,” Johnnie says. “If I go out, you know what’s
going to happen. I’ll write down some names and addresses.”

It ended up being just one name and one address, and when I got there it was all for nothing. The doc (a pill-roller whose mission was giving abortions and acid melts to erase fingerprints) had happied himself to death on his own laudanum two months before.

We stayed in that cheesy room behind Murphy’s for five days. Mickey
McClure showed up and tried to turn us out, but Johnnie talked to him in the way that Johnnie had—when he turned on the charm, it was almost impossible to tell Johnnie no. And, besides, we paid. By the fifth night, the rent was four hundred, and we were forbidden to so much as show our faces in the taproom for fear someone would see us. No one did, and as far as I know the cops never found out where we were during those five days in late April. I wonder how much Mickey McClure made on the deal—it was more than a grand. We pulled bank jobs where we took less.

I ended up going around to half a dozen scrape artists and hairlinechangers. There wasn’t one of them who would come and look at
Jack. Too hot, they said. It was the worst time of all, and even now I hate to think about it. Let’s just say that me and Johnnie found out what Jesus felt like when Peter Pilot denied Him three times in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (13)

“What’s your name, Ma’am?” Jack asks the woman. She was wearing a long gray coat and a cute sailor’s cap.
“Deelie Francis,” she says. Her eyes were as big and dark as plums.
“That’s Roy. He’s my husband. Are you going to kill us?”

Johnnie give her a stern look and says, “We are the Dillinger Gang,
Mrs. Francis, and we have never killed anyone.” Johnnie always made
this point. Harry Pierpont used to laugh at him and ask him why he
wasted his breath, but I think Johnnie was right to do that. It’s one of the reasons he’ll be remembered long after the straw-hat-wearing little pansy is forgot.

“That’s right,” Jack says. “We just rob banks, and not half as many
as they say. And who is this fine little man?” He chucked the kiddo
under the chin. He was fat, all right; looked like W. C. Fields.

“That’s Buster,” Deelie Francis says.
“Well, he’s a regular little bouncer, ain’t he?” Jack smiled. There was blood on his teeth. “How old is he? Three or so?”
“Just barely two and a half,” Mrs. Francis says proudly.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, but he’s big for his age. Mister, are you all right? You’re awful
pale. And there’s blood on your—”
Johnnie speaks up then. “Jack, can you drive this one into the trees?” He pointed at the carpenter’s old Ford.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death Of Jack Hamilton (19)

“Time to get you out of that coat and see how bad it is, partner,”
Johnnie said. It took us five minutes. By the time he was down to his undershirt, all three of us were soaked with sweat. Four or five times I had to put my hands over Jack’s mouth to muffle him. I got blood all over my cuffs.

There was no more than a rose on the lining of his overcoat, but his white shirt had gone half red and his undershirt was soaked right through. Sticking up on the left side, just below his shoulder blade, was a lump with a hole in the middle of it, like a little volcano.

“No more,” Jack says, crying. “Please, no more.”
“That’s all right,” Johnnie says, running the palm of his hand through Jack’s hair again. “We’re all done. You can lie down now. Go to sleep. You need your rest.”

“I can’t,” he says. “It hurts too much. Oh, God, if you only knewhow it hurts! And I want another beer. I’m thirsty. Only don’t put so much salt in it this time. Where’s Harry, where’s Charlie?”

Harry Pierpont and Charlie Makley, I guessed—Charlie was the Fagin who’d turned Harry and Jack out when they weren’t no more than snotnoses.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (16)

Johnnie pulled in at a Texaco, gassed up, and bought soda pops all around. Jack drank a bottle of grape like a man dying of thirst in the desert, but the woman wouldn’t let Master Piglet have his. Not so much as a swallow. The kid was holding his hands out for it and
bawling.

“He can’t have pop before his lunch,” she says to Johnnie, “what’s
wrong with you?”
Jack was leaning his head against the glass of the passenger window
with his eyes shut. I thought he’d passed out again, but he says,
“Shut that brat up, missus, or I will.”

“I think you’ve forgotten whose car you’re in,” she says, all haughty.
“Give him his pop, you bitch,” Johnnie says. He was still smiling, but now it was his other smile. She looked at him and the color in her cheeks disappeared. And that’s how Master Piglet got his Nehi, lunch or no lunch. Twenty miles farther on, we dropped them off in some little town and went on our way toward Chicago.

“A man who marries a woman like that deserves all he gets,”
Johnnie remarked, “and he’ll get plenty.”
“She’ll call the law,” Jack says, still without opening his eyes.
“Never will,” Johnnie says, as confident as ever. “Wouldn’t spare
the nickel.” And he was right. We saw only two blue beetles before we got into Chi, both going the other way, and neither one of them so much as slowed down to look at us. It was Johnnie’s luck. As for Jack, you had only to look at him to know that his supply of luck was running out fast. By the time we got to the Loop, he was delirious and talking to his mother.

“Homer!” Johnnie says, in that wide-eyed way that always used to tickle me. Like a girl doing a flirt.
“What!” I says, giving him the glad eye right back.
“We got no place to go. This is worse than St. Paul.”
“Go to Murphy’s,” Jack says without opening his eyes. “I want a
cold beer. I’m thirsty.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (15)

“All right,” Johnnie says. He’d discovered a rabbit’s foot on Mr.
Francis’s key ring, and was working it in a way that made me know
that Mr. Francis wasn’t ever going to see that Ford again. “Now, we’re all friends here, and we’re going to take a little ride.”

Johnnie drove. Jack sat in the passenger seat. I squeezed in back
with the Francises and tried to get the piglet to shoot me a grin.
“When we get to the next little town,” Johnnie says to the Francis
family in the backseat, “we’re going to drop you off with enough for bus fare to get you where you were going. We’ll take the car. We won’t hurt it a bit, and if no one shoots any bullet holes in it you’ll get it back good as new. One of us’ll phone you where it is.”

“We haven’t got a phone yet,” Deelie says. It was really a whine.
She sounded like the kind of woman who needs a smack every second week or so to keep her tits up. “We’re on the list, but those telephone people are slower than cold molasses.”

“Well, then,” Johnnie says, good-humored and not at all perplexed,
“we’ll give the cops a call, and they’ll get in touch. But if you squawk, you won’t ever get it back in running shape.”
Mr. Francis nodded as if he believed every word. Probably he did.
This was the Dillinger Gang, after all.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (12)

“Well, I don’t know how bad it can be,” I says, “when it’s only flat
on the bottom.”
We was still laughing over that just like it was new when Johnnie
and Jack come out of the trees with their guns drawn.

“Just hold still, sir,” Jack says. “No one is going to get hurt.”
The man looked at Jack, looked at Johnnie, looked at Jack again.
Then his eyes went back to Johnnie and his mouth dropped open. I
seen it a thousand times, but it always tickled me.

“You’re Dillinger!” he gasps, and then shoots his hands up.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Johnnie says, and grabs one of the man’s hands out of the air. “Get those mitts down, would you?”

Just as he did, another two or three cars came along—country-goto-
town types, sitting up straight as sticks in their old muddy sedans.
We didn’t look like nothing but a bunch of folks at the side of the road getting ready for a tire-changing party.

Jack, meanwhile, went to the driver’s side of the new Ford, turned
off the switch, and took the keys. The sky was white that day, as if
with rain or snow, but Jack’s face was whiter.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (10)

“Those cops will have radioed ahead,” Johnnie says. “If we go to St.
Paul, we’re finished. That’s what I think. How about you, Homer?”
“The same,” I says. “What does that leave? Chicago?”
“Yep,” he says. “Only first we have to ditch this motor. They’ll have the plates by now. Even if they didn’t, it’s bad luck. It’s a damn hoodoo.”

“What about Jack?” I says.
“Jack will be all right,” he says, and I knew to say no more on the
subject.

We stopped about a mile down the road, and Johnnie shot out the front tire of the hoodoo Ford while Jack leaned against the hood, looking pale and sick.

When we needed a car, it was always my job to flag one down.
“People who wouldn’t stop for any of the rest of us will stop for you,” Johnnie said once. “Why is that, I wonder?”

Harry Pierpont answered him. This was back in the days when it was still the Pierpont Gang instead of the Dillinger Gang. “Because he looks like a Homer,” he said. “Wasn’t ever anyone looked so much like a Homer as Homer Van Meter does.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (9)

“Yes, well, we ought to get you looked at when we cool off a little,”
Johnnie said. “And we have to get your coat mended, too. With
that hole in it, it looks like somebody shot you!” He laughed, and so
did I. Even Jack laughed. Johnnie could always cheer you up.

“I don’t think it went deep,” Jack said, just as we came out on Route 43. “I’m not bleeding out of my mouth anymore—look.” He turned to show Johnnie his finger, which now just had a maroon smear on it. But when he twisted back into his seat blood poured out of his mouth and nose.

“I think it went deep enough,” Johnnie said. “We’ll take care of you—if you can still talk, you’re likely fine.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “I’m fine.” His voice was smaller than ever.
“Fine as a fiddler’s fuck,” I said.

“Aw, shut up, you dummocks,” he said, and we all had a laugh.
They laughed at me a lot. It was all in fun.
About five minutes after we got back on the main road, Jack passed out. He slumped against the window, and a thread of blood trickled from one corner of his mouth and smeared on the glass. It reminded me of swatting a mosquito that’s had its dinner—the claret everywhere. Jack still had the rag on his head, but it had gone crooked. Johnny took it off and cleaned the blood from Jack’s face
with it. Jack muttered and raised his hands as if to push Johnnie
away, but they dropped back into his lap.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (7)

I ran it. We gained maybe half a mile on the milk truck, and the cops stuck behind it the whole while because there was a guardrail on one side and a line of slowpoke traffic coming the other way. We turned hard, around a sharp curve, and for a moment both the milk truck and the police car were out of sight. Suddenly, on the right, there was a gravel road all grown in with weeds.

“In there!” Jack gasps, falling back into the passenger seat, but I
was already turning in. It was an old driveway. I drove about seventy yards, over a little rise and down the other side, ending at a farmhouse that looked long empty. I killed the engine, and we all got out and stood behind the car.

“If they come, we’ll give em a show,” Jack says. “I ain’t going to
no electric chair like Harry Pierpont.”
But no one came, and after ten minutes or so we got back in the car
and drove out to the main road, all slow and careful. And that’s when
I saw something I didn’t like much. “Jack,” I says, “you’re bleeding
out your mouth. Look out or it’ll be on your shirt.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

The Death of Jack Hamilton (6)

Jack Hamilton was in the passenger seat. He got his tommy gun off the floor and was checking the drum, ready to lean out the window, I imagine, when there came another of those spink! noises. Jack says, “Oh! Bastard! I’m hit!” That bullet had to have come in the busted back window and how it missed Johnnie to hit Jack I don’t know.

“Are you all right?” I shouted. I was hung over the wheel like a monkey and driving like one, too, very likely. I passed a Coulee Dairy truck on the right, honking all the time, yelling for that white-coat-farmer-son-of-a-bitch to get out of my road. “Jack, are you all right?”

“I’m okay, I’m fine!” he says, and shoves himself and his sub gun out the window, almost to his waist. Only, at first the milk truck was in the way. I could see the driver in the mirror, gawking at us from under his little hat. And when I looked over at Jack as he leaned out I could see a hole, just as neat and round as something you’d draw with a pencil, in the middle of his overcoat. There was no blood, just that little black hole. “Never mind Jack, just run the son of a bitch!” Johnnie shouted
at me.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual