“Take my word for it, Roy,” piped up Ralph, who was seated beside his brother on the sofa. “This kid’s hell on wheels.”
“So you told me. But it’s been four years since either of you has handled anything heavy. Can he still do it?”
Virgil let a smile play around the corners of his mouth. “You supply the wheels, Mr. Farrell,” he said, “and I’ll supply the driving.”
“Well, we’ll see about that soon enough.” The gang leader got to his feet and looked down at Virgil.
“You got any plans for the next week or so?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Because you’re gonna be staying with us.” Farrell drew a slim black billfold from inside his jacket and began counting out bills. “First, get what you need; toothbrush, razor, clothes. Then come back here.” He laid the bills in Virgil’s outstretched hand, just as he got up from his own chair.
Farrell paused before replacing the wallet. “You got a piece?”
Virgil fingered the money in his hand. “A piece?”
“A gun. You got a gun?”
Virgil shook his head.
“Here.” Farrell gave him the rest of the money. “Get yourself a good one. I don’t want any of my boys to pull a job unarmed.”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Farrell,” said the initiate, shoving the money into the pocket of his cheap jacket. “You won’t be disappointed for giving me this opportunity.”
“Roy,” said the other paternally. “Call me Roy.”
The city of Miami was only about three times the size of Picher, but it was much more prosperous. The traffic here was considerably heavier, the buildings taller and more concentrated, and the impersonal atmosphere that had long ago come to places like Oklahoma City and Tulsa was just beginning to make its presence known in Miami. It was an up-and-coming town, and it showed itself as such by the number of improvements and additions that had been made while Virgil Ballard had been marking time in Jefferson City.
But Virgil wasn’t paying much attention to these as he stepped into the town’s main street and looked around. At the end of the street, nestled between the bank and a grocery store, he spotted the establishment for which he had been searching. He trotted down the sidewalk, threading his way through the passersby, and stopped before the building marked STACKENAUER’S SPORTING GOODS. An impressive array of lanterns, sleeping bags, rifles and fishing rods was arranged in the window, behind which stood a young man in a natty blazer, smiling out at his potential customer. Virgil pushed the door open and went in.
Once inside, he made his way through the maze of axes, tennis rackets, and other outdoor accouterments, and stopped at the glass counter. The young man in the blazer had beaten him there, and he came to a kind of attention behind the counter, the eager smile still on his face. “May I help you sir?” he asked.
“I’m looking for a pistol,” said Virgil unsmiling.
“Well, sir, you came to the right place.” The counterman stepped back and spread his hands on the counter to indicate the guns that were laid out beneath its glass top. “Your choice, sir. We have all kinds, old and new.”
Virgil looked the guns over. There was, indeed an admirable variety on display. Colts and Remingtons and Walthers and Mausers and a few Virgil had never heard of lay side by side in the case, their curved grips and blue barrels shining proudly against the counter’s plush red interior. After a moment of decision-making, he settled on a battered 9 mm. Luger, German Army model 1908, lying neglected between the gleaming six-shot Smith & Wesson and a vicious-looking Remington automatic. He pointed out the older gun. “Can I see that Luger?”
“The Luger?” The counterman looked crestfallen. “Yes, sir,” he said, and slid open the glass panel in back, reaching for the gun in question.
When Virgil had it in his hands, he turned it over and over, enjoying the feel of the hefty firearm. Long and sleek and heavy with most of its weight in the oversize grip, the Luger was neither beautiful, like the Smith and Wesson, nor deadly-looking, like the Remington, but held a curious kind of dignity in its obvious serviceability. It looked exactly like what it was: an obedient machine that could be relied upon to do the job for which it was designed.
“I’ll take it,” said Virgil. “How much?”
The man in the blazer looked dismayed. “Are you certain this is the gun you want, sir? It’s over fifteen years old, after all. Now, this Colt—” he reached toward the sliding panel.
Virgil interrupted him. “The Luger. How much?” He reached into his pocket.
The counterman shrugged, defeated. “Fifteen dollars.”
Virgil spread three crisp five dollar bills on the counter. “Oh—and I’ll need two boxes of ammunition.”
“Yes, sir. That’ll be another two dollars.” The counterman snatched down two dusty boxes of 9 mm. cartridges from the shelf behind him and placed them before the customer, who had laid another pair of bills on top of the others. Then he swept up the money, put it in the cash register at his elbow, and handed Virgil his receipt.
“Do you have a paper bag?” inquired the other. “I don’t want to stretch out my pocket.”
Virgil waited for the man in the blazer to make some smart comment about the quality of his customer’s jacket, but he remained silent and handed him a paper bag from the shelf.
Virgil slipped the pistol into the bag and placed the square boxes on top. “Thanks.” He turned and headed for the door. “Nice day.”
“If you say so, sir,” replied the man behind the counter, staring morosely at the thirty-dollar price tag on the Colt revolver in the case.
Chapter Five
Red dust billowed from the La Salle’s rear tires as it left the curves and roared into the straightaway. Virgil, one hand on the wheel, watched the reflections of trees flow across the deep purple finish on the long hood, listened to the gutteral booming of the exhaust, felt the powerful engine respond to his silent command, and fancied himself God. The whole world was rolling away beneath those greedy wheels. Nothing could catch him.
“How do you like it, kid?” said Roy Farrell, seated beside him. “They don’t make ’em any faster than this, you know.”
“It’s beautiful. Where’d you get it?”
Ralph Moss laughed from the back seat. Virgil heard him shift the shotgun on his knees. “We bought it. Can you believe it? Tell ’im Roy.”
Farrell nodded his assent. “A guy in Oklahoma City had it. He needed money, so I offered him four thousand. He took it.”
“Four grand?” repeated the driver incredulously. “For a La Salle?”
“He wasn’t too happy about it.”
Virgil shook his head and smiled. These bank robbers knew how to live.
Farrell reached over the back seat. “Give me that road map. I want to see where we are.”
Floyd handed him the map. He rattled it and spread it across his knees. “Dawes. Let’s see … here it is.” He planted a finger on the northeast section of Oklahoma. Then he folded the map and laid it on the seat beside him. “Three miles, kid. Three miles to paradise.”
Or hell, thought Virgil facetiously, and laid a hand on the heavy lump in the pocket of his new jacket.
Constable Ed Fellows had been the law in Dawes since 1887. Before that, he had been the sheriffs deputy, and before that, the stable boy. He had once replaced a shoe that had been thrown by outlaw Ford Harper’s horse; four years later, duty had forced him to shoot Harper.
Now, at age sixty-six, he was still a formidable sight, for he stood six-foot-five in his knee-length trooper’s boots, and, though he was stooped and had grown a slight paunch, was otherwise built like Red Grange, raw-boned and sinewy. His face was long and tanned and bony, his hair bleached white by the merciless sun. Standing with one elbow propped up on the top of the single gasoline pump in front of Fred Benson’s service station, his charcoal-gray uniform spotless, he appeared quite capable of handling any emergency that should come to his town.
He was talking with
Benson when the big La Salle pulled up in front of the bank. The doors opened and three men got out, leaving a fourth sitting behind the wheel. Two of them were each carrying something; without his glasses the constable couldn’t tell what the objects were. One of the carriers stayed outside on the sidewalk while the other two men went into the bank.
Fellows excused himself and left Fred Benson to tend to his pump while he checked out the automobile. Part of it was healthy curiosity: he had never seen a La Salle close up.
Virgil sat peacefully behind the wheel, listening to the engine’s full-throated idle. He glanced over at Floyd Moss, in the doorway of the high old brick building that was the Dawes bank. Standing there, holding a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun to discourage any unwanted visitors, he didn’t look much like an Oklahoma plowboy anymore.
There wasn’t much to see in Dawes, as Virgil found out when he looked it over through the La Salle’s windshield. A small bakery stood next to the bank, and another door in the same building led to a general store. Beyond that, a department store rose three stories into the air, the top floor of which was boarded up and still showed signs of an ancient fire in the scorched bricks above the windows. A sign advertising its annual sale hung at a dilapidated angle across the front of the building. It had obviously been up there over a year. On the opposite side of the partially paved street stood a pair of frame buildings, one a boarding house and the other a private residence. A single-pump filling station faced the bank, billing itself FRED’S SUPER SERVICE. Virgil jumped when he spotted the man in uniform approaching. He shot a glance at Floyd. The straw-headed hick wasn’t looking in the right direction.
The man in uniform had reached the car and was circling around toward Virgil’s side. He was wearing a gun. Virgil hit the horn hard. Roy Farrell and Ralph Moss were just coming out of the bank when the horn sounded. Farrell had a .45 automatic pistol in one hand and a big burlap sack in the other. Ralph had a shotgun. They noticed the constable right away.
Ed Fellows froze at the sound of the horn. He whirled to face the robbers, bringing his thumb down on the leather flap of his holster at the same time. He never got it open. Ralph shoved the shotgun into the constable’s midsection and fired. The top half of Fellows body twisted almost all the way around and a huge slop of blood splattered over the side of the La Salle. He was lifted off his feet, his uniform cap flew off, and he landed in a heap on the edge of the sidewalk. His cap hit on its edge and rolled all the way across the street and into the filling station.
Farrell was on the other side of the car and had the door open by the time the man landed. “Gun it!” he hollered, just as the Moss brothers catapulted themselves into the back seat, rocking the La Salle on its axles. Virgil let out the clutch and stomped down on the accelerator. The car shot forward in an explosion of exhaust and flying gravel. In a few seconds the town was behind them, growing smaller in the rear-view mirror as they roared northward.
“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Ralph Moss in the back seat. “The bastard was going for his gun! I didn’t want to shoot him. Son of a bitch!”
“Forget him,” said Farrell, who had opened the sack and was pulling out thick sheaves of bills. “Look at this! There must be over twenty grand in this bag. What a haul!”
Virgil was on the edge of his seat as he wound the car around a treacherous bend in the road. His face was flushed and his heart was pounding against his chest. He liked robbing banks.
The roar of Ralph Moss’ shotgun still echoed up and down the street when the denizens of Dawes came out into the sunlight. Fred Benson was the first to reach the body. He tried to turn it over, felt something warm and wet, and stood up. Then he was violently sick.
FARRELL GANG IN NEW HOLDUP!
Constable Killed in Raid on Dawes Bank.
Beneath the black headline were pictures of Roy Farrell and Ralph and Floyd Moss, front and profile. A large black question mark occupied a fourth square. Nobody had gotten a clear look at the man behind the wheel. Floyd, seated at the dining room table with the newspaper spread out before him, turned the pages slowly. “Can you believe it?” he said. “I never thought we was worth a whole goddamn special edition! If that don’t beat all!”
“Who’s that?” Virgil, looking over Floyd’s shoulder, pointed at a blowup covering half of page six. It was a full-length shot of a mustachioed young man holding a rifle propped up on its butt. He was dressed in deerskins and a ten-gallon hat and sported two pistols in his low-slung holsters. A silver star gleamed on his chest.
Floyd read the caption below the picture. “‘Ed Fellows in 1890.’ Hey, that’s the guy we killed!”
“You mean the guy Ralph killed.” Farrell, sitting opposite Floyd, was counting bills onto the table. He looked grim.
“We’re in on it just as much as Ralph,” said Floyd, looking up.
Farrell ignored him, shaking his head regretfully. “All those headlines. I don’t like it. I didn’t figure on attracting all this attention when I planned this job.”
“Ralph planned it.”
“That’s right. Which makes him responsible for this whole mess.” He stood up and turned to the window, looking out on Miami. “Can’t you see we’re crippled as long as those pictures are being circulated? We’re trapped here, damn it! Trapped!”
Floyd shrugged. “So we lay low. We got enough dough.”
“How much have we got?” asked Virgil, looking at the back of Farrell’s head.
“I don’t know. I haven’t finished counting. Over eleven thousand.”
“Eleven!” Virgil’s voice was shrill. “You said twenty!”
“That was before I started counting.” Farrell went back to the table and picked up a bundle of notes which he had laid to one side. “This stuff is mostly securities. Bonds and stuff. To us, worthless.” He tossed the bundle across the table. It landed with a thump in front of Virgil. “What are we gonna do with those, hock ’em?”
Virgil fingered the notes idly. He was thinking.
Ralph came downstairs and into the dining room. He was wearing a heavy hunting shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The back was crisscrossed with dark bands left by his suspenders while the sun had faded the rest of the shirt. His face looked ashen. He grunted when he saw the newspaper and slumped heavily into the high-backed chair in front of the telephone desk. “Crazy son-of-a-bitch constable,” he muttered. “I never had to kill nobody before. Why the hell did he do it?” The others ignored him.
“What’s all this about laying low?” said Virgil, leaning forward on the table. “Why don’t we hit somewhere else, right now, when nobody’s expecting it?”
Farrell looked pained. “Now? With our mugs all over every paper in the state? Come off it, kid!”
“No! Can’t you see what all this means? It means that the next time the Farrell gang walks into a bank, people are going to stop and listen. Have you ever had trouble getting somebody to hand over the money?”
“Sometimes.” The gang leader shrugged. “Now and then some teller gets the idea he’s Doug Fairbanks and refuses to go along. It slows us up, but they hand over the money soon enough.”
Virgil snatched the newspaper from Floyd’s hands and held it up. “Well, after they read this, there won’t be a soul this side of hell who’ll hesitate to do what you tell him. Once they know you’re ready to kill, they’ll bust their asses to fill up your little burlap sack. This story is the making of us!”
“Nobody woulda got hurt if he’d just sat back,” Ralph muttered from the corner. He studied the plank floor between his feet morosely.
Farrell looked from Ralph’s worried face to his brother’s blank one, then came back to the disturbing light in Virgil’s eyes, and wondered what the hell had happened to his perfect gang.
The big official car came to a halt by the side of the highway. An Oklahoma state trooper unfolded himself from behind the wheel and climbed down the steep bank to where the long limousine sat, partially hidden by thick underbrush. I
ts purple finish gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight. He recognized the car as the one described in the flyer he had received two days previously, and wondered which of the nearby Tulsa banks would be robbed before he could get back to headquarters.
Meanwhile, four men were leaving a bank in Clarksville, thirty miles away, with forty thousand dollars in a burlap sack.
Chapter Six
“For me?” Hazel stared at the broad, flat box in the printer’s ink-stained hands. It was wrapped in red-and-white-striped paper, and sported a green ribbon tied in a bow at the top.
The old printer nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He had to shout to make himself heard over the clattering of the big press in the center of the shop. “Fellow brought it this morning.” He handed her the box.
“What did he look like?”
The printer made a sign that he couldn’t hear.
“Never mind,” she shouted, and, with a little wave of parting, headed for the sturdy wooden stairway that led to the second story. Once there, she juggled the gaily wrapped box underneath one arm and took her apartment key from the plaster strip above the door. She unlocked it and went in.
The setting sun showed brightly through the tall window in the opposite wall as she lugged the package over to the Victrola and set it on top. She removed her hat and gloves, threw them along with her purse onto the low easy chair beside the phonograph, and attacked the package.
The tissue paper inside the box parted to reveal the satiny folds of a bright green evening gown. She gasped in awe and reached out to touch it. The material ran through her fingers like water.
“It goes with your eyes.” The voice, coming from behind her, was deliciously familiar. She turned. Virgil, resplendent in black and white pinstriped suit and patterned tie, was leaning in the bedroom doorway, grinning. He wore a gray felt hat tilted rakishly back on his head.
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