The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Thomas Mullen

where he is?”

      Chance didn’t answer.

      “We still owe him his stake,” Jason explained, not mentioning that they no longer had the money.

      Chance exhaled a cloud. They were like three bored dragons in a too-small cave. “There’s a cottage he and his wife have used.”

      “In the U.P.?” Jason raised his eyebrows. Chance made an expression that was not fully a confirmation. “Jesus, then he’s an idiot.”

      Jason had met Owney Davis in prison during his second bootlegging rap, before graduating to bank jobs. Let out two weeks after Jason, Owney became a part of the Firefly Gang from the beginning. He was a loyal friend whose life ambition was to form a new church, in the hope of spiritual as well as financial enrichment. Jason found it difficult to believe Owney would turn Judas. But he also found it difficult to believe that, with all the heat on them, Owney and his wife would run to the same Michigan lake house they’d used as a hideout months earlier, when the heat had first intensified.

      “What’s the word on Marriner, Brickbat, and Roberts?” Jason asked.

      “Look, Jason, if someone did stooge on you, it coulda been anyone. Ten grand is a lot of money.”

      Ten grand was the most recent reward the Justice Department had posted for information leading to the Firefly Brothers’ arrest. It had started at fifteen hundred, then doubled after two cops were killed during a November bank job in Calumet City, then doubled again in the early spring, when the feds belatedly realized that a fatal February bank job in Baton Rouge had actually been pulled off by the Firefly Brothers. Louisiana was far outside their usual territory, of course; after a busy autumn in the Midwest, the brothers had spent much of the winter hiding out, first in Florida and then in New Orleans. It had been a wise time to hide: the U.S. attorney general and a bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover from something called the Bureau of Investigation were making speeches about the need for a stronger national police force, something capable of investigating the complex cases that bumbling state squads couldn’t handle. A federal crime-fighting agency would conquer gangsterism just as the New Deal would conquer the depression, Hoover claimed. When the Firesons’ money grew scarce—and the exoticism of the South was over-powered by their nostalgia for home—Jason had started scouting banks in Baton Rouge, leading to the reunited gang’s first endeavor in more than two months. After that, the price on the brothers’ heads continued to rise as stories proliferated about their escapades, some of them accurate and some of them the falsely attributed crimes of other, less famous outlaws. Finally, the feds had rounded the price off to an even ten, causing the brothers to wonder if that number would continue to appreciate for as long as they drew breath, or if it would eventually crash like the stock market if people lost interest. Or if they simply disappeared.

      “Well,” Jason said now, “we’re hoping to narrow the list of suspects.”

      “You should have too many other things on your mind to be interested in revenge, boys.”

      “We didn’t say anything about revenge. We’d just like to know if someone did rat on us, so we can avoid that someone in the future.”

      “Well, if anyone did they didn’t tell me.”

      “I never asked if they did. I just asked if you knew where our boys are.”

      “People haven’t been using the Chance McGill line the way they used to, but—”

      “Because you wouldn’t let us,” Whit said.

      “Damn right I wouldn’t let you!” He held the cigar away from his face and extended a reproachful finger. “I’ve worked my way up inch by inch, son, and I’m not gonna let it get torn down by a couple brothers who’ve managed to get ten state police forces, Pinkertons, postal cops, the National Guard, and the fucking federal government after them, no matter how goddamn charming one of them happens to be.”

      Jason put a hand on Whit’s shoulder. “We’re not blaming you for anything, Chance. We’re just—”

      “Your brother sure as hell is.”

      “Whit didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, back to square one. You’re saying you don’t know hell’s first whispers about where our boys are?”

      Chance managed to move his eyes from Whit to Jason. “Marriner’s still living the good life, far as I know.” Marriner Skelty, Jason’s bank-robbing mentor with decades of endeavors to his name, had possessed the good sense to retire after the Calumet City job in November. “As for Brickbat and Roberts, nix.”

      “Brickbat was never my biggest fan,” Jason said, to draw him out.

      “I always did notice an added degree of tension in the room when he was in it. Crazy bastard. Never shoulda gotten involved with him, Jason.”

      “I got wise eventually.”

      The brothers had kicked Brickbat and Roberts out of the gang after the bloody Baton Rouge job. Brickbat was as his nickname implied, all stubborn force and no thought. He was only five-six, but his thick frame contained the coiled rage of three generations of doomed Iowa home-steaders. Still, if you were at least a few feet away from him you stood a reasonably good chance of outsmarting him before he got close enough to break your face. Unless he was packing, which he always was. Starting out as the muscle guarding cigarette shipments in St. Paul, he’d worked a few bank jobs with the Barker Gang in Minnesota. According to the police, he’d rubbed three cops in the process; according to Brickbat, the body count was seven. He’d been in the opening months of a permanent holiday courtesy the state of Illinois when he was liberated during the same jailbreak that freed such now-infamous hoods as Henry Pierpont and John Makley, of the Dillinger Gang. Brickbat knew Owney through some work they’d done on a Minnesota bootlegging line, and at the time Jason needed an extra torpedo and figured the man’s brand of pugilistic cockiness would make him a natural for the job. Thus was a regrettable relationship born. Jason quickly tired of the way Brickbat’s palsied trigger finger made bank jobs more violent affairs than they needed to be. Jason had handed Brickbat an extra cut when he booted him from the gang, in the hope that it would constitute ending on good terms, but something in the man’s demeanor had left Jason with the uncomfortable feeling that this was not yet a farewell.

      Elton Roberts, Brickbat’s only friend, was a heavy drinker, a trait the Firesons distrusted. A little here and there was fine, but a man who couldn’t be counted on to drive straight or think straight was an unnecessary risk. Fortyish and debonair, Roberts was a grifter who’d spent the past few years ripping off the hopeless jobless across the Midwest. Decked out in a dapper suit and possessing a smooth voice, he looked every bit the trustworthy businessman, or at least what a poor egg thought a trustworthy businessman would look like, if there were any. He would troll the breadlines and find a few suckers, preferably immigrants or farmers who had lost their property and were overwhelmed by their urban environs. He’d tell them he was the manager of a new building in town that needed four elevator operators; the job paid thirty a week—not bad at all—and all the fellows needed to do was front him fifty each for their uniforms. The fellows usually didn’t have that much cash, but they’d ask for a day or two to rustle the funds from their cousins or in-laws or dying grandparents. Once Roberts had their money, he’d tell them the building’s address and ask them to show at eight the next morning. When they did, they would find that Roberts wasn’t there and that the building had no elevator. Roberts bounced from city to city working that grift and a few others before the cops got wise. Then, while doing time, he met a jug marker with a list of banks to hit once he got out. Like a skittering asteroid, Elton Roberts eventually came into Jason’s orbit. Because Roberts looked straight and could talk his way out of trouble, Jason had taken him on as a faceman. He learned about Roberts’s jobshark scams only after a few weeks of working together, when Elton got drunk and boastful. That’s when Jason realized he’d never liked the man.

      “Look,” Chance said, “I know Brickbat’s crazy, but I don’t see him for a finger-louse. Last I heard he was gearing for some big job. Was trying to get the Barkers involved, but they wouldn’t