If there’s one lesson I can give anyone reading this book on how to succeed in the world, it’s to have good connections. A goon lives and dies by his contacts. Some guys spent their whole lives connecting and reconnecting with the same boss. A cowl would hit a hot streak of robberies, build themself up, and then get trounced by a cape. That was the cycle for a long time. For guys like me, that created a very limited window to make a few bucks for themselves. Having no income stream when your boss goes up for five years is a bad way to live, so if you had any desire to survive and thrive, you made contacts.
My guys were all former Outfit people. Goombas, associates, and a few people above street level. Once the mafia started to crumble and there wasn’t any money in hooch, these guys started branching out from bookies and loan sharks to brokers and handlers. Guys like me, from the old days, could make a few phone calls and figure out the what’s what and the who’s who in just about any city you could think of from Maine to Florida. Most of the jobs floating around just seemed like cape bait run by cop magnets, and without a good contact you could find yourself doing one stretch after another and not make a dime.
It was early summer 1940, and I was back in the mix after that Blastmaster debacle. After my encounter with Black Shadow, I decided to return to my old stomping grounds on the East coast. I had just been on the wrong end of a dust up between the King’s Court and the Five Boroughs Boys where I managed to get away before the Boys managed to get the upper hand and eight guys from the Court were hauled off to jail. I’m not much of a fighter, but I got a few tricks that have helped me get one over on guys that spent all day in the gym. But against capes, regular guys like me just can’t compete. Just as the chaos was setting in I managed to wobble Bronx Bull with a button hook and dove out a window. I spent half a day hiding on the bank of the East River and watched the show.
The Court paid well, but they weren’t paying anyone to do a stretch in the pen, and they knew it too. Twenty guys went into a warehouse looking to make an easy little score for “the Duke” (not sure which one) when it all went down. A lot of guys will break and run when a cape shows up. Five showing up is a guarantee that probably half of your guys are gonna look for an exit. That day I was one of those guys, and no shame in it. I didn’t live this long thinking I could go toe-to-toe with Lightning Lad or Utopian.
Of course, running also means that there’s no pay for your work. So I was out a day’s work and was soggy to boot. I went to ground to lick my wounds and reached out for another gig.
I was shooting pool and drinking ice cold sodas at the Triple Ace club in Harlem for three days before the call came in. A cowl was looking for an extra hand for an old-fashioned night time B&E. Right up my alley. I paid the tab with my last few bucks and hitched a ride down to Fifth avenue in Manhattan. There I met with a contact who takes me to a warehouse down by the docks. It was busy with regular work traffic, and we blended in pretty well. Before long I was sitting in a warehouse with three other guys and Hammerhead.
Hammerhead was some kind of sailor before he had some kind of accident that turned him into whatever the hell he was. He didn’t look like a shark or anything, but he was one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. He wore this costume that was part bits of metal and shark skin. On top of that he was freakish strong, even for a cowl. He had a bit of a reputation as a hot head (go figure), but somebody was obviously looking out for him as he was connected enough to reach out and expect someone like me to appear.
Hammerhead wasn’t much of a planner, it turns out. The job was simple: We were breaking into an art gallery to steal some paintings on commission from an unknown party. This was not unheard of, most of the crimes you read about that involve something other than cash are done on commission. After all, what good is it to steal the Mona Lisa if you can’t possibly sell the thing? The buyer wanted eleven paintings in total, and we had a list of names. One of the guys was a locksmith, so he’d handle the door. Hammerhead would keep the exit clear in case a cape showed up. The rest of us were to gather the paintings. Easy peasy, right?
The first part of the plan worked like a charm, we were through the front door and into the gallery in three minutes. The rest wasn’t so easy. If you’ve never been in an art gallery before, it’s a gigantic maze. It must have taken us nearly an hour before we finally located and gathered up the paintings. I was certain a cape was gonna show up the whole time. As time went by, and one by one we came back with the paintings, it really looked like we were going to pull this off and I started to relax.
As we were gathering our gear and getting ready to leave, I decided to hustle to the back office and see if there wasn’t a safe or a cash box we could pilfer. One of the unwritten rules of being a goon is that anything outside the scope of the job was free game. This is how you really make your nut. If you were ever going to retire from this job, this was the way to secure it. The path to the back office went through a gallery of statues, which was exhibiting some kind of ancient Rome art or whatever. Lots of white marble statues of myths and that. Never had a taste for that kind of thing, so I didn’t look too hard. I had other priorities.
The back office was exactly like I imagined it would be. Record books, schedules, papers everywhere, it was a mess. Luckily, the one thing you could count on being free of clutter was the safe. Every business had to have one back in those days. There weren’t no credit cards or 24 hour bank vaults. If you needed cash in a hurry to arrange something, you were out of luck if you didn’t have it on hand. Hence the safe. Another stroke of good luck is that the museum curator didn’t know what makes a good safe, so they just bought something that looked good. I had it open in seconds and was stuffing eight grand into an envelope I snagged from the desk.
Cash rich and more than a little pleased with myself I made my way back into the exhibit. The moon had come out in the time it had taken me to loot the office, and the hall looked different from when I’d entered. I had just spotted the door I was looking for when something stopped me in my tracks.
The temperature had dropped, and I could feel a slight breeze on my face. The smell of grass, trees, and cold mountain air was overwhelming. I felt someone staring down at me, so I turned to look. A ten foot statue of a woman holding a pitcher was illuminated in the light of a window…
The trees rustled in the downdraft that carried the smell of the mountain down through the valley. The green grass looked black in the moonlight, but the occasional flickers of fireflies gave it bursts of yellow and gold. The woman was staring down at me with eyes as blue as sapphires. The expression on her face was disapproving. I felt ashamed, but I couldn’t look away. She reached a hand out and touched my shoulder…
“Hey, pal,” A man’s gloved hand was shaking me. Suddenly everything came into focus. I was standing in the middle of the statuary hall, staring at the statue of the woman. I came back to my senses and shook my head. I looked over at the person shaking me, and I nearly flinched. Hammerhead was giving me the kind of look you never want to get from a guy like that.
“Quit screwing around, we gotta go.” Hammerhead gave me a final unfriendly shake and looked in the direction I had been a moment ago. “What are you looking at?”
I wasn’t about to admit that I just had some kind of out of body experience or whatever. I just pointed at the window behind the statue.
“Nothing, thought I saw something.”
“Yeah?” Suddenly Hammerhead was interested, and crept over to the window for a look. After a few moments he shook his head. “Nothing out there.”
“Must be seeing things,” I mumbled, making my way out of the exhibit.
“Well, get the damn lead out of your ass, we need to be gone.” Hammerhead was clearly annoyed at the delay, but I couldn’t spare the time to care. The feeling of shame I had with me paired with the shock of whatever had just happened had me completely unnerved. I spent the rest of the trip back to the warehouse in silence. I remember thinking that I might have picked up some kind of illness, or maybe I was just going crazy.
Before I knew it I was hustling out of the warehouse with cash in my pocket and a stupid look on my face. I had no idea just what had happened to me and no clue on where to find out. I walked eight blocks before I even thought to catch a cab. I bundled myself in the back and told the driver to take me to a decent hotel. I stared out the window at the passing nightlife, and I gradually managed to return to my senses. By the time I made it into the sack I was completely burned out. I was out before I could get my shoes off.
I woke up the next morning and made my way down to the street after a shower and shave. I felt human, my step was lighter, and the money in my pocket gave me an urge to do some spending. First thing on my mind was a decent breakfast. I went to a cafe near the hotel and ordered breakfast and a copy of the paper. After every successful job I bought a good breakfast and read about the job in the newspaper. They had whole sections for burglaries and stick-ups and the like, usually on the bottom fold of the front page. I nearly choked on my coffee at the headline. “Priceless Paintings Pilfered, Minute Men On The Hunt.”
Without even realizing it, we had pulled off one of the biggest heists in New York history. The paintings we picked up were worth millions. My take wasn’t anywhere near that. I was as flush with cash as I’d ever been, sure, but it amounted to something like eight grand. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but at the time that was some guy’s yearly salary, Not a bad take for one night of hired help. Being a hired goon meant you didn’t get the protection of an organization after the job, but that also meant I got to cut ties at the end of the job. I was free and clear, as far as loyalties go. I could work for the Court one day and then work for one of their rivals the next. It was usually a great arrangement.
But at the moment I was on my own, sitting out in the open, and the Minute Men were after the guys that just pulled off a legendary robbery.
I hustled out of the cafe before the scrambled eggs got cold. The Minute Men had a bad reputation, and for guys like me that wasn’t a good thing. Goons tended to get the same treatment from the Minute Men as the cowls. They pulled no punches, they weren’t interested in keeping the peace, and they didn’t care about making arrests. I only ever ran into them once before that, and it ended with a broken nose, broken ribs, and five months in the clink. I beat feet down toward the docks and decided I’d put up for passage out of the city, or hop a train as a last resort. It wasn’t smart to head toward the scene of the crime, but I was in a hurry and it may have just been my paranoia, but it felt like I could feel the law closing in.
I made it about a mile down the road before the fight came to me.
The day’s traffic was moving steadily and I managed to get myself stuck in with the crowd when there was the sound of a crash somewhere in front of me. Suddenly the crowd started turning and running away. I managed to make my way out of the rush by jumping up onto the base of a light pole when Lexington, the Minute Men’s resident bruiser, came sailing through the air and crashing into a parked taxi cab.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I spent a few seconds gaping at the semi-conscious cape pulling himself together before turning my attention to the fight. Concord, Savannah, and Bennington were trying their best to overwhelm the last man I had expected to see: Hammerhead. The big palooka was slapping them around despite Concord braining him with a manhole cover and Savannah doing that screaming act that made me have to cover my ears. Bennington was trying to wrap that ridiculous magic chain around Hammerhead’s wrist, but ‘Head saw it coming and yanked the schmuck off his feet and swung him into Savannah, who in turn blasted Concord with that voice thing she does.
To the untrained eye it might have seemed like Hammerhead was holding his own, but I could tell it was only a matter of time before the Minute Men figured out the right combination to bring him down. In the back of my mind I knew it was time to beat a hasty retreat, and my instincts were pointing me toward the wharf and the fishing charters. The Minute Men would probably spend another ten minutes trying to bring down Hammerhead then the rest of the day handing him over to the cops, and in that time they wouldn’t think to take a second look at some random guy on the street.
Something stopped me and held me in my spot. It’s hard to describe in any other way than some invisible person putting a hand to my shoulder and holding me there. Hammerhead was drenched in sweat and breathing hard. The Minute Men were still pulling themselves together, but they were in much better shape. I could see from the grimace on Hammerhead’s face he knew what was about to happen, and there was this look in his eye that said “Over my dead body.”
I hopped over Lexington and made my way around the abandoned cars until I spotted a Packard delivery truck that was idling nearby. The driver had apparently cut the engine and bailed out when the action started, but didn’t think to take the keys. I fired it up and pulled it in reverse toward the fight. Hammerhead turned to look at the oncoming truck and was bracing himself to get hit by two tons of steel. He had a shocked look on his face when I cut the wheel and smacked the bumper into Lexington, who had been looking to bum rush ‘Head while his back was turned.
“Get in,” I shouted at him as I threw the passenger door open.
“Hey, I know you,” said Hammerhead in that way most of us do when we run into someone in the market.
“Get in, dammit!”
Hammerhead finally recognized what was happening and climbed into the cab. I had the accelerator floored before he got the door closed, hopping the curb and tearing ass toward Jersey as fast as Detroit muscle could take us. Hammerhead was still juiced up from the fight and kept checking the mirrors expecting to see the Minute Men appear out of nowhere. By the time we hit the other side of the bridge he managed to relax.
“Rotten bastards,” he said while peeling off the costume, starting with the mask. “They knew this would happen. Send me to steal the goods and make sure only I take the heat. The papers knew the paintings was gone before the museum staff. Court set me up.” He threw the mask against the dashboard and did the same with his gloves. He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in the seat.
After a long silence where I assumed he’d fallen asleep, the question in my head finally came out of his mouth. “Why’d you help me out?”
I’d been rolling that one over in my head since about twenty seconds after I jumped into the truck. I didn’t do things like this. I kept my head down, I did what I was told and I stuck my neck out for nobody. Prior to that day I would have wished Hammerhead well and scuttled off down the road and never thought twice about it. This time, something stopped me. I didn’t know if it was the sight of one cowl taking on four superpowered capes, but something told me that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I walked away. I was sure it would have ended badly for Hammerhead. Very badly. It took time before I answered.
“I don’t know,” I said, proving why I didn’t have a job in public office. “I just couldn’t sit there and do nothing.”
“Huh.” Hammerhead seemed to accept that answer for what it was. We sat in silence for a time while I worked out what to do. I knew a small town on the coast where a guy like me could make a few calls, so I stashed the Packard while Hammerhead found himself some mechanics coveralls and a burlap sack for his gear from a closed auto shop. I used the phone at a diner to get a line on the action in New York, but got no news. Apparently the Minute Men weren’t in hot pursuit, they were too busy looking for the stolen paintings. I said as much to Hammerhead as he got to the business of eating every slice of pie the diner had to offer.
“I knew when those jerks showed up just as I was skipping town that I was done for,” Hammerhead said when he finished his fifth slice of pie. The guy could eat. “If it was just the one or two I coulda broke loose and hid out until the heat died down, but all four…” He stared down at the empty plate and leaned back in his seat. I decided to change the subject.
“The truck is only gonna last us for the next few hours, maybe less if the cops figured out we left New York,” I said between sips of coffee, “You got some place I can drop you?”
“Yeah, I got a place down the road a-ways, on the shore,” he took one of the cigarettes out of my pack and lit it with a table match. “Listen, I hate to ask, but I’m kinda short right now. You think you could cover the bill?”
I agreed, and he immediately ordered two more slices of pie to go. The guy could *really* eat.
An hour later we were heading down the road with Hammerhead giving directions. Apparently the forty pounds of sugar he ate was making him feel better because he wouldn’t stop talking. He went on about his time in the Navy, when he got started with the Hammerhead gig, how he got to be so strong, the whole life story. Apparently one time he got marooned on a rock off the coast of Suriname. He was there for ten days with no food or water and was surrounded by schools of sharks. Apparently he became so desperate that he finally dove into the water and wrestled a shark back onto the rock and ate it raw. When a boat of fishermen found him he was literally face down in a hammerhead shark, tearing meat out like a wolf. The name stuck.
After a few hours of this he finally slowed down and appeared to become introspective. “This was supposed to be the last one,” he said, “Finally be able to get out of the business. Get the boat repaired. Run charters again. Finally get out.” I remember him staring out the window for a long time after that. I started noticing details about him. He was older than I figured initially. He’d seen a lot of time in the sun.
And he was wearing a wedding band.
Before long I was pulling the truck up along the curb in front of a two-story on the bay side. The house was in good shape, but could use a new coat of paint. Two kids were playing in the front yard with a yappy little dog chasing them around. A woman was hanging laundry on a clothesline. As soon as ‘Head stepped out of the truck it was like their whole world opened up. The kids came squealing through the front yard to him. He barely had the kids wrestled back to the ground before the woman came to him and they had their own reunion.
I sat there and stared at the whole scene. I felt an ache deep down in places you don’t think exist until they start hurting. For almost 12 years I’d been working toward nothing more important than booze, skirts, and my next meal. I had nothing set aside. At that moment I realized how hollow and meaningless my efforts had been. All that blood shed, all those scars earned, and when I went to sleep the best I could hope for was hotel sheets. I had spent a night in one of New York’s best hotels, but as I looked at Hammerhead’s life I knew he had me beat by miles.
I thought about what Hammerhead said and made a decision. I wanted that life. Not one spent on the ragged edge, but something that mattered. I took a moment to find a pencil and write a message on the heavy envelope in my pocket, then I scooped up Hammerhead’s gear bag and exited the truck. I didn’t want to inject myself into the scene, so I just waited quietly until ‘Head acknowledged my presence.
“You forgot your bag,” I said and sat the bag down on the shaggy lawn. I tipped my hat to his wife. “Have a nice day, folks.”
Hammerhead gave me a single nod, and I returned it. That’s as close as he could get to thanking me for what I did in front of his family. We were on the level. I got the message.
I was ten miles down the road and started thinking about what all I’d seen and done in the last two days. I lucked my way into a heist for the record books. I’d had a vision of a woman I could only remember seeing once before, while I was dying on the ocean floor. I managed to save a cowl from what was likely a long stretch of time, maybe worse. I’d seen the life I always wanted, but didn’t know it. I’d stuffed what remained of the eight grand I’d stolen into Hammerhead’s gear bag with a note that said “Good luck.”
And I had, apparently, stolen a truck load of cigarettes.
I hadn’t thought to look in the back of the Packard until I was coasting into an Outfit hole-up in the sticks. When I did, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Cases and cases of Lucky Strikes. Hundreds of thousands of freshly packaged cigarettes, stamped and banded, ready for the market. Apparently the guy that bailed from the truck worked for a distribution company and was just getting started with his deliveries when everything went crazy. I made a few phone calls and managed to net myself a two grand for the smokes and another grand for the truck.
Those are the kind of scores you live for. Lots of ink is good, but easy money is better. Money just falling into your lap. Once I had the cash in pocket I spent a few weeks on the Jersey shore until the heat died down. I didn’t think the Court would be upset with me for springing Hammerhead from their trap, but I wanted to keep my head down until I knew otherwise. I spent my days sitting on the beach and watching the boats go by. I wondered if one of them was Hammerhead’s boat. I wondered if eight grand was enough to get him out of the game. I wondered if I had it in me to get out of the game when my time came, or if I’d end up standing in front of an impossible situation with that “Over my dead body” look on my face. I wondered about the blue-eyed woman and what it all meant.
I remembered the conversation I’d had in the prison hospital with Triton. I thought about his parting words. He’d mentioned my fate, but nothing else. It had been ten years since I’d last seen the vision of the mountain valley and the blue-eyed woman. Whatever Triton was talking about had something to do with it, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what.
I spent the bulk of the next year working jobs in the Carolinas and down into Florida. I got a real taste for beach life, and wanted to stay as far away from the New York capes and cowls as I could. The action was getting too hot up north. I decided to take the easy living and easy pay. I was saving up a nice little chunk to make my move at creating a life for myself.
And then the whole world had to go to war.