the Hot Kid (2005) by Elmore - Carl Webster 0 Leonard Page B

Harkrider's for a pack of cigarets and a sack of Beechnut scrap. He was surprised to see Louly.
    "You're still working here?"
    "No, Carl, I'm shopping for my mom. I got my reward money and I'll be leaving here pretty soon. Mr. Hagenlocker hasn't said a word to me since I got home. He's afraid I might shoot him."
    "Where you going?"
    "This writer for True Detective wants me to come to Tulsa. They're willing to put me up at the Mayo Hotel and pay a hundred dollars for my story. Reporters from Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, have already been to the house."
    "You're sure getting a lot of mileage out of knowing Pretty Boy, aren't you?"
    "They start out asking about my shooting that dumbbell Joe Young, but what they really want to know, if I'm Charley's girlfriend. I say, 'Where in the world did you get that idea?' "
    "You don't deny it."
    "I say, 'Believe what you want, since I can't change your mind.' All I'm doing is having some fun with them."
    "And becoming famous," Carl said. "Maybe it can get you something you've thought of doing."
    "Like what, become a chorus girl? Yeah, I'll get a job in George White's Scandals." Louly picked up her sack of groceries. Carl took it from her and they walked out of the store to her Ford roadster parked on the street, Carl saying, "I wouldn't be surprised you can do just about anything you want. You still have my card?"
    "I keep it in my Bible," Louly said.
    Carl, holding the sack of groceries, smiled at this farm girl who'd shot a wanted fugitive and entertained herself talking to newspaper reporters. The photos of her didn't show her hair's blaze of color, or the easy way she could look up at you with those brown eyes. Or the way she said to him now, "I like your hat."
    Carl couldn't help smiling. He said, "Give me a call when you get to Tulsa, I'll buy you an ice cream soda."
    Chapter 6
    The reason Tony Antonelli was on hand to write what he was thinking of calling "The Bloody Bald Mountain War," he had returned to Krebs on his own to cover a labor strike. The mine operators announced they were cutting wages by 25 percent, and the miners of Local 2327 walked out of Osage No. 5. Their demand: the company continue to pay them a flat six dollars and ten cents a day. Tony had grown up with most of the Italian miners and wanted to hear their side of the disagreement. They told him they were standing for a bare-minimum living wage, nothing less. It was bad enough, they said, spending ten hours in the hole with those stinking mules. They said the animals stunk so bad of putrid gas, you could blow yourself to hell striking a spark with your pick. Tony wasn't sure if this was true but wrote it anyway. It was good stuff, the attitude of the miners.
    The company brought in strikebreakers along with a man by the name of Nestor Lott, at one time a special agent for the Justice Department in Georgia, going after moonshiners defying Prohibition by the unlawful manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Krebs chief of police, a man named Fausto Bassi, told Tony that Nestor Lott was known to have gunned down more moonshiners than he arrested, and that the man's judgment had a "hair-trigger."
    Nestor Lott wore two .45 automatics, military issue, one holstered on each hip and snugged to his legs with leather thongs. Tony wrote in his notebook: "He is a man of small stature, no more than five-three, who stares with a look of intensity in his cold gray eyes that holds one's attention. When he smiles, which is seldom, one is never certain if it is to express pleasure, or even goodwill, for the smile never shows in his eyes of steel." Nestor Lott got rid of the company strikebreakers saying they were drunks and derelicts with no personal stake in the situation, and recruited members of the local Ku Klux Klan for the job. He told them , "You know these dagos are all Socialists, enemies of our American way. We run 'em out now or they'll be after your jobs, your farms, and they'll lure your Christian women as