That came out of left field! The boy thought for a few moments, then said, “Bible history, I guess.”
This seemed to really surprise Papa. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the stories. I always liked stories.”
Papa smiled again, then asked, “You like stories with happy endings?”
“Sure... but not all good stories have happy endings. The ones in the Bible have really bad endings, sometimes, sad endings.”
O’Sullivan thought about that, then he nodded. “But maybe they teach us something... the sad-ending ones.”
That seemed reasonable to Michael. “Yeah... Pop?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get mad.”
“I won’t.”
“... Did you like Peter better than me?”
His father’s expression was blank; but something in the man’s eyes made Michael wish he hadn’t asked the question.
“Oh Michael, no,” he said, and he touched the boy’s arm. “I loved you both the same.”
“But you couldn’t have.”
“... Why?”
“Because if you loved us the same, you wouldn’t treat us different.”
His father blinked. “Did I do that, son?”
“... Well. Yes. Sure.”
Papa sighed, then he said, quietly, “I didn’t love you the same... I loved you equally. Understand?”
“I think so.”
“I may have seemed to love Peter more, because... ”
“Because he was the baby?”
Papa swallowed. “Yes. Because he was the baby, and... he was just a sweet boy. You know? Sweet.”
“He never hit you with a snowball.”
Though his eyes remained sad, Papa laughed, once. “No, he didn’t. But he did have a sweetness about him that... you and I don’t have, son.”
“We don’t?”
“You were more like me. Peter was more like Mom.”
The boy thought about that.
Then his father said, “I didn’t mean to treat you different.”
This was getting hard on both of them, so Michael just shrugged and said, “Okay. It’s okay... ’Night, Papa.”
And, on impulse, he hugged his father around the neck, being careful not to hurt the man’s sore arm. Papa hugged back, not being so careful.
After his son began softly snoring on the couch, O’Sullivan was able to get his mind back on the task before him. Something Rance had said — or maybe it was something about the accountant’s attitude — made O’Sullivan think an answer of sorts might be waiting to be found in these figures.
So he sorted through the documents, setting some aside, looking at others, overwhelmed, out of his element. Finally a buff-colored file almost seemed to appear in his hands...
... CONNOR LOONEY, it was boldly marked.
Surprised, interested, he began to look carefully through it — at letters, accounts, bills of lading, receipts, dockets, and more. He pushed the other books and ledgers and files aside and concentrated on this one.
And when the sun came up, O’Sullivan — fully dressed, ready to ride, 45 under his arm, new information in his brain — gently shook Michael awake, saying, “Up up up.”
The bleary-eyed boy leaned on an elbow and asked, “Where’s the fire?”
“Time to go. We don’t want to wear out our welcome.”
Michael gave him no argument, though the boy was clearly conflicted about leaving behind his new “family,” and yet obviously anxious to get back out on the road with his father.
As they rolled out of the barn in the Ford, O’Sullivan waved at the farm couple, who waved back. He leaned out the window, and said, “We left a little thank you,” and pointed to the barn. Then the car rolled out onto, and down, the dirt road.
The Baums were already heading into the barn, and O’Sullivan smiled at his son, who smiled back. The couple would soon find out it sometimes paid to be hospitable: the O’Sullivan “gang” had left them stacks and stacks of money packets on a bale of hay... hundreds of thousands of dollars in Capone money. Let Choctaw top that.
They were on a paved highway when he told the boy they were heading back to the Tri-Cities.
“Why are we going back?” Michael asked.
“Something doesn’t add up, son,” he said, nodding toward the back, where the ledger books and files were now stowed in the compartment under the seat. “Men lie, but numbers don’t. Facts and figures... It’s always about money.”
“You mean, math?” the boy asked.
“Math,” his father said.
Sixteen
John Looney had a ranch in Chama, New Mexico, an adobe fortress where he had gone from time to time, to rest or to hide out from his enemies. After the Market Square riot, when Looney was fined by the court for incitement and his newspaper (temporarily) shut down, the patriarch went to the ranch to recover from injuries delivered by local cops who were in the pocket of a Looney rival. Another time Looney holed up at the ranch recovering from wounds received in a duel. Many true-crime historians have wondered why Looney stayed around the Tri-Cities when the trouble with Mike O’Sullivan started. Some contend that he did flee, briefly at least, to his New Mexico “home away from home,” and one account has federal agents arresting him there.
Though I have no direct proof other than my recollection, I believe my father had heard from a friend on Looney’s payroll that the old man was packing up for another of these New Mexico “vacations.” This was in part why we rushed from Oklahoma back to Illinois, while Papa was still weak from his injury.
That, and the discovery he had made in that strongbox he’d taken from the suite of Alexander Rance.
A sunny Sunday morning, crisp but not quite cold, found the bells ringing and the Irish Catholics of the Illinois side of the Tri-Cities converging on St. Peter’s. The parking lot was full outside, the pews full within. God was doing a hell of a business today, John Looney thought, eyeing the throng — better business than he had, of late, his mind on this goddamned O’Sullivan matter.
Looney — along with his trusted bodyguards Jimmy and Sean (on his right and left hand, respectively), as well as other more respectable members of the parish — knelt at the altar rail to receive communion. Among the morning’s last group to receive the Eucharist, Looney rose and returned down the aisle, the congregation all around kneeling in their pews in meditation. The choir sang in the Latin gibberish that the old man found so soothing — all this ritual was reassuring, the pomp and circumstance of it such wonderful theater, the trappings a delightful blend of fear and forgiveness, mass itself a droning reiteration of tradition and order in a cruel, chaotic world.
John Looney had no use for the empty cross of the Protestants, who insisted their Christ had risen, and that the cross should be a symbol of redemption. He embraced instead the cross of the Catholics, with Jesus in plain view, suffering, bleeding, living the life of hell-on-earth His father had willed to man.
The old man in his well-pressed, somber dark suit and tie looked like a Methodist preacher himself; but the irony was lost on him. Looney sidled into his pew, and with Jimmy and Sean’s help lowered himself at the padded kneeling bench; moments later — in the row behind him — a man spoke, not in a whisper, but softly enough that only Looney (and perhaps his boys) would hear.
“Hello, John.”
Looney did not need to turn to know Mike O’Sullivan knelt at the bench in the pew directly in back of him. “I’ll be damned,” the old man breathed.
O’Sullivan said, “Not a good churchgoer like you... Sean, Jimmy. Morning.”