Free Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman

having veered too close to its gun for comfort, I watched the battered black Lincoln following our original path with Lon Camarillo standing on the running board, bracing himself with an arm hooked around the window post and pumping away with what looked like a Browning Automatic Rifle at the center of the network of cracks. His face in the moonlight with the buttstock against his cheek looked like the Grim Reaper’s. At the wheel of the Lincoln, his bald head shining, sat Hannion, the train robber from Oklahoma.
    “Son-of-a-bitch cowboys,” growled Kramm.
    The former aviator and his partner weren’t the only ones who had caught on. The driver of the Packard was spinning his wheels in a white blur now, frantic to back away onto a better footing. His engine whined, but the car only subsided into a drunken tilt, spoiling the aim of the gunner in back and thrusting its armored prow farther out over the shoal.
    A wheel broke through and the car stumbled, then went down on both knees as the ice collapsed under the other front wheel. White floes stood up in shards and slid under the black water. The Packard teetered, rear wheels turning in empty air, a scaled-down Titanic suspended on a cloud of exhaust.
    We didn’t stay for the rest. Jack threw on the headlamps and started in a long loop toward the Michigan shore. With their lead car foundering, the others in the hostile party had lost interest in the fight and sought to spread out to avoid a chain reaction. Bumpers and fenders tangled as more than one driver chose the same route. Friendly headlamps came on behind us.
    “They’ll try again in town,” Kramm said.
    “No, Pete’s got a deal in Monroe.” Jack’s voice was pitched high, but not from fear. “How we doing, any fresh dead? Connie?”
    “I’m okay.” Actually I was. I had thought I’d wet myself in the excitement, then discovered that a bullet had pierced the crate at my elbow, smashing a bottle and drenching the seat in Old Log Cabin. “They’d go to all that trouble just for liquor?”
    “This is a million-dollar load. He’s got payments to make on that rolling hunk of boilerplate. Besides, he never did forgive Joey for kidnapping him that time. It made him look common.”
    “Wonder how the others come out.” Of all of us, Bass Springfield seemed the least transported.
    Jack said, “They know where to go when we get separated.”
    Kramm chuckled. “You see that lardbutt Packard go down? I never seen nothing like it, not even in Russia.”
    “Good thing Lon come along,” said Springfield.
    “I softened it up for him.”
    Jack wasn’t listening. His eyes in the rearview mirror were bleak. “When I find out who stooled I’m fucking gonna pick his bones.”

Chapter Seven
    Minor’s Majors
    BY C ONNIE M INOR
    B ONAPARTE AT A USTERLITZ HAD nothing on a local lieutenant of bootleggers, hardly more than a boy, who last night on the battlefield of icebound Lake Erie routed an army of hijackers with a few bursts from a submachine gun.
    Historians tell us Napoleon destroyed the Russian Army in Prussia by directing his cannon at a chain of frozen lakes over which the enemy sought retreat, plunging horses and men into the icy waters and claiming victory. Although it’s a fair bet this gang tactician has never read Von Clausewitz (or even Hans and Fritz) and knows nothing of the Napoleonic Wars …
    And like that. It creaks a little now, but it read better when it was fresh. Well enough anyway to be picked up by the wires and land me my first Pulitzer nomination. I think I’d have had a shot at it, too, had not the deadline been months away; by which time, for reasons I’m about to set forth, the notion of gangsters as modern Robin Hoods was as dead as Franz Ferdinand.
    The night the Banner with my Battle of Lake Erie column hit the streets, I celebrated. With a bonus practically in my pocket I started high, watching the Grosse Pointe suckers and getting suckered myself at roulette in the Aniwa Club