It

been sitting on and landed in the grass, Andy Criss shouting «I’m killed! I’m killed!» over and over again, alth ough he was never so much as touched; neither of them were.
‘Joe Conklin, he had time to fire both his guns empty before anything so much as touched him. His coat flew back and his pants twitched like some woman you couldn’t see was stitching on them. He was wearing a straw hat, and it flew off his head so you could see how he’d center-parted his hair. He had one of his guns under his arm and was trying to reload the other when someone cut the legs out from under him and he went down. Kenny Borton claimed him later, but there was really no way to tell. Could have been anybody.
‘Conklin’s brother Cal came out after him soon’s Joe fell and down he went like a ton of bricks with a hole in his head.
‘Marie Hauser came out. Maybe she was trying to sur render, I dunno. She still had the compact she’d been using to powder her nose in her right hand. She was screaming, I believe, but by then it was hard to hear. Bullets was flying all around them. That compact mirror was blown right out of her hand. She started back to the car then but she took one in the hip. She made it somehow and managed to crawl inside again.
‘Al Bradley revved the La Salle up just as high as it would go, and managed to get it moving again. He dragged the Chevrolet maybe ten feet before the bumper tore right off ‘n it.
‘The boys poured lead into it. All the windows was busted. One of the mudguards was laying in the street. Malloy was dead hanging out the window, but both of the Bradley brothers were still alive. George was firing from the back seat. His woman was dead beside him with one of her eyes shot out.
‘Al Bradley got to the big intersection, then his auto mounted the curb and stopped there. He got out from behind the wheel and started running up Canal Street. He was riddled.
‘Patrick Gaudy got out of the Chevrolet, looked as if he was going to surrender for a minute, then he grabbed a.38 from a cheater-holster under his armpit. He triggered it off maybe three times, just firing wild, and then his shirt blew back fr om his chest in flames. He slid down the side of the Chevy until he was sitting on the running board. He shot one more time, and so far as I know that was the only bullet that hit anyone; it ricocheted off something and then grazed across the back of Greg Cole’s hand. Left a scar he used to show off when he was drunk until someone — Al Nell, maybe — took him aside and told him it might be a good idea to shut up about what happened to the Bradley Gang.
‘The Hauser woman came out and that time wasn’t any doubt she was trying to surrender — she had her hands up. Maybe no one really meant to kill her, but by then there was a crossfire and she walked right into it.
‘George Bradley run as far as that bench by the War Memorial, then someone pulped the back of his head with a shotgun blast. He fell down dead with his pants full of piss . . . ‘
Hardly aware I was doing it, I took a licorice whip from the jar.
‘They went on pouring rounds into those cars for another minute or so before it began to taper off,’ Mr Keene said. ‘When men get then: blood up, it doesn’t go down easy. That was when I looked around and saw Sheriff Sullivan behind Nell and the others on the courthouse steps, putting rounds through that dead Chevy with a Remington pump. Don’t let anyone tell you he wasn’t there; Norbert Keene is sitting in front of you and telling you he was.
‘By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn’t look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That’s when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.’
Mr Keene rocked in his chair, his slippers bumping placidly on the floor, looking at me.
‘There’s nothing like that in the Derry News,’ was all I could think of to say. The headline for that day had read STATE POLICE , FBI GUN DOWN BRADLEY GANG IN PITCHED BATTLE . W i t h the subhead ‘Local Police Lend Support.’
‘Course not,’ Mr Keene said, laughing delightedly. ‘I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.’
‘Christ,’ I muttered.
‘Get enough licorice, sonny?’
‘I got enough,’ I said. I licked my lips. ‘Mr Keene, how could a thing of that . . . that magnitude . . . be covered up?’
‘Wasn’t no cover-up,’ he said, looking honestly surprised. ‘It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn’t President and Mrs Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.’
‘But the women?’
‘Couple of whores,’