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fall, let me tell you where that leaves me. Out on a limb. Way, way out.”
    Earl appraised him. He was so handsome a man, so confident. In fact, he was oddly mated with the sad-sack old teetotaler with the watchful eyes and the big hands. Who were they? What did they want?
    “So I’m in a tough situation,” Becker continued. “I’m getting death threats, my wife is being shadowed, it’s getting ugly down there. Hot Springs. Not a happy place. Totally corrupt. It’s run by an old gasbag mayor and a judge, but you can forget about them. The real power is a New York mobster named Owney Maddox who’s got big-money boys behind him. They own everything, they have a piece of all the pies.”
    “I still don’t see where Earl Swagger fits in.”
    “Well, what I’m getting at, Sergeant, is that Owney Maddox doesn’t want anybody messing with his empire. But that’s what I’m sworn to do.”
    “You must think I’d be a bodyguard,” Earl said. “But I ain’t no bodyguard. Wouldn’t know the first thing about that line of work.”
    “No, Sergeant, that’s not it. In order to survive, I have to attack. If I’m on the defensive it all goes away. We have a chance, a window in time, in which we can take Hot Springs back. They’re complacent now, they don’t fear me because the rest of the slate lost. What can one man do, they think. If we move aggressively, we can do it. We have to blitz them now.”
    “I ain’t no reformer.”
    “But you know Hot Springs. Your daddy was killed there in 1942 while you were off fighting the Japanese.”
    “You been lookin’ into me?” Earl said narrowly. He wasn’t sure he liked this at all. But then this man was the law, after all, by formal election.
    “We made some inquiries,” said the old man.
    “Well, then you learned it wasn’t Hot Springs. It was a hill town way outside of Hot Springs, closer to his home territory. Mount Ida, it was called. And I wasn’t fighting the Japs yet. I was on a train with two thousand other suckers pulling cross-country to begin the boat ride out to the ‘Canal. And I don’t know Hot Springs. My daddy would never take us. It was eighty miles to the east, over bad roads. And it was the devil’s town. My daddy was a Baptist down to his toes, hellfire and damnation. If I’d gone to Hot Springs, he’d a-whipped me till I was dead.”
    “Yes, well,” said Becker, running hard into Earl’s stubbornness, which on some accounts just took him over, for no good reason.
    Earl took another hit on the bourbon, just a taste, because he didn’t want his brain more scrambled. But he just didn’t get a good feeling about Becker. He glanced at his Hamilton. It was getting near to 7:30. Soon he had to go. Where were these fellows taking him?
    He looked at the silent old man next to Becker. What was familiar about him?
    “Well, Sergeant—”
    But Earl stared at the old man, and then blurted, “Excuse me, sir, I don’t know if I caught your name.”
    “Parker,” said the old man. “D. A. Parker.”
    And that too had a ring somehow.
    “You wouldn’t be related to—nah.”
    “Who?”
    “You wouldn’t be related to that FBI agent that shot it out with all them Johnnies in the ‘30s. Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde. Went gun-to-gun with the bad boys of the Depression. Famous, for a while. An American hero.”
    “I ain’t related to that D. A. Parker one damned bit,” said the old man. “I am him.”
    “D. A. Parker!”
    “Yes, that’s me. I’m not with the Bureau no more. And, no, I never shot it out with Johnny Dillinger, though I come close once or twice. I had nothing to do with Bonnie and Clyde. Them was Texas Rangers operating on the fly in Louisiana that caught up with that set of bad apples and did a day’s worth of fine work. I tracked Ma and her boy Freddie to Floriday, but I don’t think it was my burst that sent Ma to her grave. We believe she killed her own self. I did put eleven rounds