Hooligans Read online

  Hooligans

  Wiliam Diehl

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2012

  Table of Contents

  HOOLIGANS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Preface

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1 - ACE, DEUCE, TREY

  Chapter 2 - SIGHTSEEING

  Chapter 3 - DOOMSTOWN

  Chapter 4 - LEADBETTER'S LEGACY

  Chapter 5 - THE WAREHOUSE

  Chapter 6 - INSTANT REPLAY

  Chapter 7 - EXIT SCREAMING

  Chapter 8 - THE CINCINNATI TRIAD

  Chapter 9 - SCREWING UP ROYALLY

  Chapter 10 - STICK

  Chapter 11 - DEATH HOUSE ON FLORAL STREET

  Chapter 12 - FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, ARRIVAL

  Chapter 13 - STONEWALL TITAN

  Chapter 14 - THE COMMITTEE

  Chapter 15 - DOE

  Chapter 16 - BAD DREAMS

  Chapter 17 - PLAYING BY THE BOOK

  Chapter 18 - CHEAP TALK, RICH PEOPLE

  Chapter 19 - LITTLE TONY LUKATIS

  Chapter 20 - HIDE AND SEEK

  Chapter 21 - MEMORANDUM

  Chapter 22 - DRIVE-IN

  Chapter 23 - HEY, MR. BATMAN

  Chapter 24 - DUE PROCESS

  Chapter 25 - LIGHTNING PEOPLE

  Chapter 26 - SILVER-DOLLAR WOMAN

  Chapter 27 - BUSINESS AS USUAL

  Chapter 28 - THE SINGING ROPE

  Chapter 29 - DISAWAY

  Chapter 30 - MAGIC HANDS

  Chapter 31 - INVITATION

  Chapter 32 - UP JUMPS THE DEVIL

  Chapter 33 - ISLE OF SIGHS

  Chapter 34 - LATE CALL

  Chapter 35 - WESTERN UNION

  Chapter 36 - BREAKFAST TALK

  Chapter 37 - LURE

  Chapter 38 - FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE FIRST SIX

  Chapter 39 - DEAD MAN'S FLOAT

  Chapter 40 - SKEELER'S JOINT

  Chapter 41 - RELICS

  Chapter 42 - FIGHT NIGHT AT THE WAREHOUSE

  Chapter 43 - DOG WITH A BAD COLD

  Chapter 44 - UNCLE JOLLY'S

  Chapter 45 - DOUBLE FEATURE

  Chapter 46 - DOGS

  Chapter 47 - TITAN DEALS A HAND

  Chapter 48 - SO . . . LONG . . .

  Chapter 49 - WHO'S NEXT?

  Chapter 50 - CASABLANCA

  Chapter 51 - A LITTLE R AND R

  Chapter 52 - DEEDEE

  Chapter 53 - NUMBERS GAMES

  Chapter 54 - FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

  Chapter 55 - OBIT

  Chapter 56 - DEAD HEAT

  Chapter 57 - RAINES GETS TOUGH

  Chapter 58 - FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE SECOND SIX

  Chapter 59 - PYRAMIDS

  Chapter 60 - THE COCKTAIL HOUR

  Chapter 61 - MIRROR TRICKS

  Chapter 62 - G-A-L-A-V-A-N-T-I

  Chapter 63 - DEATHWATCH

  Chapter 64 - BlACIC-WATER DIVE

  Chapter 65 - LONGNOSE GRAVES

  Chapter 66 - SHOOTOUT IN BACK O'TOWN

  Chapter 67 - BODY COUNT

  Chapter 68 - MONEY TALK

  Chapter 69 - THANK YOU, MA BELL

  Chapter 70 - MURDER ONE

  Chapter 71 - NANCE SHOWS HIS STRIPE

  Chapter 72 - FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, END OF TOUR

  Chapter 73 - ZAPATA SAVES THE DAY

  Chapter 74 - CHRISTMAS CREEK

  Chapter 75 - GOOD-BYE HIT

  Chapter 76 - VOTE OF CONFIDENCE

  Chapter 77 - RETURN TO WINDSONG

  Chapter 78 - EULOGY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HOOLIGANS

  "Make no mistake, these guys are cool. They're men's men. They prefer action to talk, but when they talk, it's tough, dirty, often funny and always realistic. . . . Diehl does a fine job of capturing that sense of male camaraderie, where a lot is expressed in a minimum of words. "

  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  "Diehl keeps the action at a suitably slam-bang pace, pushes it along with a great deal of hard-boiled dialogue, and flavors it with ghoulish four-letter humor. . . . it's tough to knock a guy who writes: '"Who are you?" he asked her. "Lark," she said. "That your name or your attitude."' Both, as it turns out. The novel, too—it's another lark. "

  New York Daily News

  "Some of the strongest passages in the work are the Vietnam flashbacks. . . . a first-class shoot-'em-up book."

  Cleveland Plain-Dealer

  "This is Diehl's best book yet."

  The Chattanooga Times

  "The fun here is in the antics of the oddball Hooligans, who are more fearless and exotic than the A-Team. . . . the author has Joseph Wambaugh's knack of sketching brain-scrambled cops and a clean, unfettered skill at creating suspense and dialogue. "

  Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

  Also by William Diehl

  CHAMELEON

  Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of William Diehl. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  http://seven-ways-to-die.blogspot.com/

  Story Merchant Books

  9601 Wilshire Boulevard #1202

  Beverly Hills CA 90210

  http://www.storymerchant.com/books.html

  This book is dedicated to Virginia,

  who is the love of my life;

  To Michael Parver, for his support and

  friendship through the tough times,

  and for Stick;

  And to my father, the most gentle

  and loving man I have ever known,

  who died before it was completed.

  SPECIAL OPERATIONS BRANCH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks and gratitude to my family and friends for their constant encouragement and support: to my mother, Temple, Cathy, John and Kate, Bill, Melissa and David, Stan and Yvonne, Bobby Byrd, Carole Jackowitz, Marilyn Parver, Michael Rothschild, Billy Wallace, Frank Mazolla, the Harrisons of Lookout Mountain, Mark Vaughn, Barbara Thomas, Jack and Jim.

  To a true and trusting friend, Don Smith, whose wit and wisdom always help.

  To my good friend, C.H. "Buddy" Harris, of the Treasury Department, for his selfless assistance and attention to detail, and to his wife, Joan, and daughter, Robin.

  To Director Charles F. Rinkevich, Deputy Director David McKinley, Kent Williams, Charles E. Nester, Morris Grodsky, and the other officers of the Treasury Department's Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Brunswick, Ga., for their invaluable technical assistance.

  To George Gentry and the many other men who served in Vietnam and shared their experiences and feelings with me.

  To George, Bill, Bear, B.L., Nancy and Slavko, Sandy, Jim, Frankie and Jingle, Larry, Averett, Ted, Mike, Kurt, Richard, Ruth, Dayton, and all my friends and associates of the late, great Higdon's on St. Simons Island, Ga., for sharing their names, friendship, time, and experiences with me.

  To my editor, Peter Gethers, a man of awesome insights, and to Susan and Audrey, and the rest of his sterling staff.

  To Marc Jaffe, for his continued faith.

  To Irene Webb, my favorite wonder woman.

  And to a treasured and lasting friend, Owen Laster, at once and always, a gentleman of the realm.

  CINCINNATI TRIAD

  The fish trusts the water,

  And it is in the water that

  it is cooked.

  —HAITIAN PROVERB

  PREFACE

  DUNETOWN

&nb
sp; Dunetown is a city forged by Revolutionaries, hammered and shaped by rascals and southern rebels, and mannered by genteel ladies.

  Dunetown is grace and unhurried charm, azalea-lined boulevards and open river promenades, parks and narrow lanes; a city of squares; of ironwork and balustrades, shutters and dormers, porticoes and steeples and dollops of gingerbread icing; of bricks, ballast, and oyster shells underfoot; a waterfront place of massive walls and crude paving, of giant shutters on muscular hinges and winding stairwells and wrought-iron spans; a claustrophobic vista where freighters glide by on the river, a mere reach away, and sea gulls yell at robins.

  It is a city whose heartbeat changes from block to block as subtly as its architecture; a city of seventeenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and taverns; of ceiling fans and Tiffany windows, two-story atriums, blue barrel dormers, Georgian staircases and Paladian windows and grand, elegant antebellum mansions that hide from view among moss-draped oaks and serpentine vines.

  Dunetown is a stroll through the eighteenth century, its history limned on cemetery tablets:HERE LIES JENIFER GOLDSMITH

  LOVING WYF OF JEREMY

  WHO DIED OF THE PLAGUE THAT KILED SO MENY

  IN THESE PARTS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1744

  JAMES OLIVER

  A FAST TONGUE AND HOT TEMPER

  DEAD AT 22 YRS. OF HIS AGE

  IN A DUEL WITH LT. CHARLES MORAY

  WHO SHOT QUICKER AND WITH KEENER EYE

  These are its ancestors. The survivors become the city's power brokers, the rulers of the kingdom, dictating an archaic social structure that is unchanging, and defined by its metaphor, the Dune Club, restricted to the elite, whose money is oldest, whose roots are deepest, and who, for more than a century, have sequestered it from time.

  Thus the years have passed Dunetown, leaving behind a treasure: an eighteenth-century serfdom whose history trembles with ghost stories, with wars and brawls and buried loot on shaggy Atlantic beaches; whose people have the heritage and independence of islanders, their bloodlines traced to Irish colliers, Spanish privateers, to Haiti and Jamaica, and Cherokee reservations.

  Its bays, marshes, and rivers still weave a city composed of islands: Alee, Skidaway, Thunderhead, Buccaneer, Oceanby, Sea Oat, and the wistful, Gatsby-like Isle of Sighs, a haunt of the rich, its antique houses serene against the backwaters of the sea, where one might easily envision a solitary and forlorn Jay Gatz, staring across the water at the solemn light on Daisy's pierThe past is everywhere,

  If you listen,

  For that is not the wind you hear,

  It is the whispering ghost of yesteryear.

  Reality, to Dunetown, is history to the rest of the world.

  INTRODUCTION

  A Walk Through Dunetown

  J. THOMPSON, 1972

  PROLOGUE

  Sunday: Dawn The small trawler was heading north an hour before dawn on the eighth day out of Cumaná, Venezuela, when the captain of the four-man crew first spotted the red trouble light blinking on the mast of the sailboat. He made it a mile or so away when he saw it the first time. The trawler was ten miles at sea and thirty-five miles northeast of Fernandina, Florida, at the time. The captain watched the light for half an hour as his rusty scow drew closer.

  In the gray light just before the sun broke, they were close enough to see the sailboat, a rich man's toy, dead in the water. It was a forty-footer, with a man on deck. The man had removed his shirt and was waving it overhead.

  The captain, a deeply tanned man in his early forties wearing four days' growth of beard, stroked his jaw with a greasy hand. Two of the crew members watched the sailboat draw closer with mild interest. The mate, a black man with a scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, squinted through the dim light and then urged the captain to pass up the stricken boat.

  "Fuck 'em, man. We ain't got time to mess with no honky sailors," he said quietly.

  But the captain had been a seaman too long to pass up any vessel in distress. Besides, the shirtless man was obviously rich; a soft, Sunday sailor, becalmed far beyond his limit and probably scared to death.

  "No guns," the captain said softly in Spanish. "Just stand easy and see what they want. If gas is their problem, we can help the gringos out."

  He turned on a powerful light and swept its beam along the sailboat from bow to stern. He steered the trawler close beside the sailboat and tossed the man a line.

  "Habla español?" the captain asked.

  "No," the sailor answered.

  "What ees your problem?" the captain asked in broken English.

  "Not enough wind." The sailor, who was wearing white jeans and designer sneakers, pointed at the limp sail. "And no gas. Can you sell me some gas?"

  "I geev you enough gas to make Saint Simons Island," the captain said, pointing toward the horizon. "Fifteen, maybe twenty miles northwest."

  "Thank you, thank you very much. Muchas gracias, señor." The man bowed and waved a thank-you.

  The captain ordered one of his men to take a gas can aboard the sailboat. The man went below and emerged a few minutes later with a ten-gallon can in hand. He and one of the other crewmen scrambled aboard the sailboat.

  The captain and the mate watched from aboard the trawler.

  "Messin' with trouble," the black mate mumbled.

  "No problem," said the captain.

  The two crewmen had not quite reached the stern tanks of the sailboat when the hatch to the cabin suddenly slid back and another man jumped on deck from below. He was holding a submachine gun. The mate uttered an oath and reached for the pistol in his belt but he was too late. The man with the machine gun raked the deck and bridge of the trawler.

  Bdddddddddddddt . . .

  Bdddddddddddddd . . .

  The windshield of the captain's cabin exploded, showering glass across the deck. The first burst blew away the captain's chest. He flew backward through the door and landed on his back on the bridge. His foot twitched violently for a few seconds before he died.

  The second burst ripped into the mate as he clawed under his coat for the 38. It lifted him high in the air, twisted him around, and tossed him halfway across the deck. He fell like an empty sack, face down, most of his head blown away.

  The remaining two crew members, the ones who had boarded the sailboat, turned wild-eyed toward the gunner. The shirtless man stabbed one of them in the chest with a bowie knife. He fell across the stern, babbling incoherently. The man with the submachine gun fired a burst into the chest of the last crewman, who dropped the gas can and flipped backward over the railing into the sea.

  The shirtless man pulled his knife free, cleaned the blade on the dead man's pants, and tossed his victim overboard.

  The shooter sent another burst into the light and it exploded into darkness.

  It was all over in thirty seconds.

  They worked very quickly, searching the boat. It took less than half an hour to find their prize. They transferred the three small, heavy bags to the sailboat, threw the captain and his mate into the sea, doused the trawler with gasoline, and set it afire.

  The shirtless man cranked up the engine of the sailboat and guided it away from the trawler; then, setting the wheel, he joined the shooter and they checked out the prize.

  "What d'ya think?" the shirtless man said, leaning over and staring into one of the bags.

  "Beautiful," the shooter said. He moved behind his partner, took a .357 Magnum from his belt, and stepped closer.

  "Sorry," he said. He held the gun an inch or so from the back of the shirtless man's head and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared and the bullet smacked into the back of the man's head, knocking him forward against the railing.

  The shooter reached out for the body but it fell sideways, was caught for an instant in the line of the foresail, and then rolled over it and plunged face forward into the sea.

  "Shit!" cried the shooter and made a frantic last grab, but it was gone. The body bobbed to the surface like a cork on a fishing line, t
hen went under.

  The shooter ran back to the tiller, shoved the throttle on full, and turned the boat sharply around. He searched for ten minutes, hoping to get a glimpse of his victim, but he finally gave up.

  He was a mile or so away when the gasoline on the trawler exploded, spewing up a broiling ball of fire that for a moment or two rivaled the rising sun.

  He watched the trailing smoke grow smaller and smaller until he could see it no longer.

  1

  ACE, DEUCE, TREY

  Going back to Dunetown was worse than going to Vietnam. I didn't know what was in store for me in Nam; I knew what was waiting in Dunetown.

  As the plane veered into its final approach, memories began to ambush me, memories that pulled me back to a place I had tried to forget for a lot of years, and to a time that was, in my mind, the last green summer of my life. After that, everything seemed to be tinted by the colors of autumn, colors of passage. Dying colors.

  The colors of Nam.

  Brown, muddy rivers. Dark green body bags. Black cinders where trees and villages had once stood. Gray faces with white eyes, waiting to be zipped up and shipped back to the World and laid away in the auburn earth.

  Those were the hues that had painted my life since that summer. 1963, that was the year.

  A long time ago.

  For over twenty years I had tried to erase the scars of that year. Now, suddenly, it was thrust back at me like a dagger, and the names and faces of another time besieged me. Chief. Titan. Wally Butts and Vince Dooley. Teddy.

  Doe.

  Time had dulled the blade, sanded down the brittle edges, but it had only sharpened that one persistent pain. Doe Findley was the last fantasy I had left. I had flushed most of my other dreams, but that one I hung on to, protecting it, nurturing it, seeking shelter in it, and I wasn't ready yet to surrender it to reality.