Something inside the door went clunk and it swung open. “All right, step aside,” directed Virgil, and put one foot into the vault. He pulled a black cloth sack from his pocket and glanced back across the bank floor. “Alex, get the cash out of the tellers’ drawers. Boyd, make sure nobody gets cute.” He began scooping money into the sack. Alex vaulted the marble counter and started in rifling the cash drawers while Boyd moved in to block the doorway, crouching over his machine gun, eyes eerily neutral behind the clear lenses of his big glasses.
“You’re Virgil Ballard, ain’t you?” The question, coming from somewhere in the crowd of hostages, was so unexpected that everything came to a complete stop.
Virgil paused to look at the crowd. “Who said that?” He studied the frightened faces.
An old farmer in a faded plaid shirt and clean overalls stirred in the center of the crowd. “I seen your pitcher in the paper. It’s you, ain’t it?”
Virgil hesitated, then grinned brightly. “Yeah, pops. It’s me.”
“I knowed it was you, yes, sir. Hee-hee.” The farmer was almost jumping. “You’re Public Enemy Number One, ain’cha?”
“That’s what they say. Now shut up. I got work to do.” He stooped and resumed filling his sack.
“Jesus Christ!” It came from the front of the bank, almost a scream.
Virgil stood ramrod-straight. Alex paused in his emptying of the cash drawers to see what was going on. Boyd, the one who had shouted was standing kitty-corner to the revolving door, staring past the glass panel, where a motorcycle cop was coming up the steps toward the bank’s entrance.
“What the hell happened to Roscoe?” Virgil started to ask, but was cut off by Boyd’s machine gun.
Boyd crouched almost to a kneel, clamped his gun to his hip, and cut loose. The glass in the door exploded outward. Bullets struck the wooden frame and the door began spinning. The cop catapulted backward as if he had been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat, a huge smear of blood slinging from his front and splattering across the marble steps, his cap sliding down his face and striking the bottom of the door frame, from which it bounced and rolled across the lobby floor. His head snapped back with the impact and he went over backward in a half somersault. He landed at the bottom of the steps, his smashed head splatting against the sidewalk.
The door hadn’t stopped spinning when the alarm bell began to clang. One of the tellers had hit the nearest switch and scampered back to where the rest of the employees were standing, watching the blood-spattered wreckage of the door in awe-struck silence. At the same instant, the bank president attempted to swing the heavy vault door shut while Virgil was inside. It struck his leg and he roared, smacking it so hard with the heels of his hands that it sprang back and narrowly missed clapping the president full in his distinguished face. As it was, he barely leaped back in time, and kept on moving as Virgil leveled his Luger and fired point-blank at him. Bullets streamed from the barrel like those of a machine gun, brrrrrping past the executive’s ear as he belly-flopped to the floor. Every one of them missed.
Thinking he’d killed him, Virgil snatched his half-filled sack from the vault floor and loped toward the smashed bank entrance, taking the counter at a leap. Alex was right on his heels, his own sack lying forgotten beneath the open cash drawers as he galloped across the tile floor holding his machine gun like a balancing rod, horizontal across his midriff. “Hope you guys get away,” called the old farmer as they dashed past. The alarm bell banged away relentlessly.
Boyd, who had remained crouching long seconds after the policeman’s body had come to a rest on the sidewalk, came out of his trance and ran a close third behind Alex as he followed Virgil out the door.
There were cops all over the street. A few had come at the sound of the alarm. Most of them, however, were answering the silent alarm that had begun ringing in the police station the moment the three had entered the bank. Black-and-white patrol cars, their red lights flashing, were parked near the curbs, on the sidewalks, in the middle of the street, as were a number of official-looking motorcycles. The shot policeman lay in an impossible position at the foot of the steps that led up to the bank’s entrance, his front torn open, his face shot away. The sidewalk all around him was stained dark with blood.
The cops started the shooting. Firmly entrenched behind their cars, they began firing the moment the bank robbers bolted into the open. Boyd and Alex gripped their machine guns tightly and sent twin streams of lead fanning out from the entrance, sweeping the exposed street. Bullets thumped and smacked and clanged into the parked cars, smashed windows and mirrors, chipped across brick buildings, zinged off the concrete sidewalks. Virgil, who had leaped sideways off the steps after his dash through the door, stood in the shelter of the lofty pillar that supported the ornate porch roof, firing short bursts from his converted Luger at the blue-topped heads that appeared for an instant above the roofs of the automobiles, then disappeared. The two machine guns were hammering away above his head. Every now and then, a deluge of ejected brass shell casings came raining down around him, but he ignored them and continued firing. While it was obvious from the level of his partners’ fire that they were only trying to keep the cops busy, Virgil was shooting to kill.
“Boyd! Alex! The car!” Hunching low and depressing the trigger for a continuous burst, he began moving forward in the direction of the carpenters’ van. Boyd and Alex came slowly down the steps, throwing lead at a steady rate over the officers’ heads.
The lead was coming so furiously now that the police were trapped behind their cars, unable to move except to poke their heads into the open to take pot shots at the robbers, then duck back again as a new blast came their way. Virgil and Boyd and Alex came across the sidewalk like a small army, steadily advancing through the opposing fire, making their way toward and around the parked cars in an effort to get to the other side of the van. The only trouble was, when they got there, the DeSoto was gone. There was an empty space where they had left it, marked by two black streaks of rubber.
“Where the hell is Roscoe?” screamed Virgil, standing in the middle of the vacant street.
The police seemed to sense their predicament, for the fire from both sides of the street immediately stepped up. Orange flame erupted from all sides, plucking at the pavement around the stranded robbers, slamming holes into the “No Parking” signs at head level. One of the front tires of a police car near Alex Kern exploded and the car settled into a lopsided kneel. He retaliated with a new burst in the direction of the bullet’s origin.
Boyd Harriman leaped to the curb opposite the bank and, in the middle of the deadly crossfire, poked his head through the open window of a parked automobile in search of the keys. There were none. Waddling awkwardly beneath the weight of his bulletproof vest, he scurried along the curb, checking every car on down the line, without success. He ducked down again.
Virgil exhausted his clip, threw it away, and slammed in a new one from his belt. He racked in a shell and began firing again, turning around and around as the opposing gunshots sounded near him. Alex, whose submachine gun had jammed momentarily, got it going again and raked across the already shattered car windows with short bursts.
Virgil was the only one with a comfortable amount of ammunition left. Alex and Boyd had come out with only their fifty-round drums and no extras, and these were getting low. Alex had taken to firing less than six bullets at a time, and Boyd, who was getting farther and farther away in his search for a suitable escape vehicle, wasn’t firing at all at the moment. Only Virgil, the leader, was daring to rip away at the police with sustained bursts from his machine pistol. He came closer to exhausting his supply with each passing second. Save for Boyd, who had downed the motorcycle cop with his first hail of lead, nobody had hit anyone.
Then, from up the street, the answer came rolling smack into the middle of the action. A battered old Essex appeared at the top of the slight rise above the bank, its driver cheerfully oblivious to the inferno that had been goin
g on for over twenty minutes. It bounced and jostled and shuddered right into the crossfire. Only when the big square windshield was shot away did the man in the driver’s seat realize what was going on. He piled out, a white-haired old man in a cloth cap and worn tweed suit, and sprawled across the gutter, holding his hat and head down as the bullets whistled close over his head. The Essex, its motor still running, went on rolling down the street, in spite of the projectiles smacking into and through its doors, seats, wheels, windows, heading inexorably in the direction its absent driver had chosen.
Alex and Virgil spotted the abandoned vehicle at the same time and made a dash for it, firing all the way. Virgil ducked through the open door on the driver’s side and grabbed the wheel while Alex, running alongside the moving car, clawed open the rear door on the passenger’s side and threw himself headlong across the back seat. He scrambled to his knees and smashed the butt of his machine gun through the riddled back window, then switched ends and began firing through the hole in long, sweeping bursts.
Virgil, who had quit shooting long enough to yank the car into control, caught sight of Boyd Harriman in the rear-view mirror and shouted “Boyd! Come on!”
Thirty yards up the street, Boyd looked up from the parked car he was investigating and saw the bullet-scarred Essex rocking away down the street. Alex Kern leaning out the back window, machine gun blazing. Hugging his own weapon, he left the curb and hot-footed it down the middle of the thoroughfare in the direction of the escaping vehicle.
Alex spotted the youngster and redirected his fire so that he wouldn’t hit him, hammering more bullets into the hissing vehicles parked by the curb. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the unmistakable blue of a policeman’s uniform pop into the open on the other side of the street. A clear shot, if he were free to make a clean sweeping blast in the cop’s direction, which he wasn’t. In order to avoid cutting down Boyd, he was forced to chop off his fire and slide the gun in an arc toward the cop, then resume shooting at the uniform. The maneuver took too much time.
Boyd was running at top speed, his long slicker flowing out behind him, the weight of his bulletproof vest pulling him forward into a crouch. He was holding his machine gun out in front, flinging short bursts at the main body of lawmen on the side of the street opposite the bank. He didn’t notice the cop bearing down on him from the other direction.
The cop, a foot patrolman who had just arrived on the scene, had his revolver out and, spotting the man in the bulletproof vest running toward him, snapped off three quick shots in his direction. Two of them struck Boyd in the vest, knocking him off balance and putting holes in the fabric through which the shiny steel showed. The third grazed his shoulder. He was just in the act of dodging around the rear end of a poorly parked car when they hit, leaning at a precarious angle, one foot in the air. He scrabbled to regain his balance, his foot slipped on the slick pavement, the weight of the damaged vest pulled him over. A volley of shots came at him from the other side while he was in midair. Alex watched as the bullets struck Boyd from all sides, making his body dance in the air, smashing him in the legs, arms, face, jaw, and neck. A bullet crashed into the frame of his eyeglasses at the nose and they parted, falling in two sections from his head. He went down on his side and his machine gun leaped from his hands and bounced and rolled down the gutter. It came to a rest against the tires of a demolished police car. Alex’s shoulders sank. “Step on it,” he told Virgil half-heartedly.
Virgil, who had seen most of the action in the rear-view mirror, banged the shifting lever into third and punched the accelerator. The engine answered readily enough and the car lurched into a roar, speeding through the withering police crossfire. “I told him that damn vest was no damn good,” he grumbled.
Alex kept up a steady return fire out the back window until the ammunition in his drum was exhausted. Then he dropped the machine gun bouncing on the seat beside him and drew his .45 automatic from his shoulder holster, with which he began snapping wild shots here and there at the rapidly receding police cars. The air was whooshing in cold through the empty windshield frame. The car hit a slick spot, throwing Alex hard against the doorpost as Virgil fought the steering wheel and brought the Essex skidding sideways around the corner. Then he accelerated again and the chaotic street fire was left behind. Alex slumped down in the back seat and put away his pistol. “I wonder what happened to Roscoe?”
“I don’t know,” said Virgil veering into the side street they had chosen earlier and heading north. “But I sure as hell know what’s going to happen to him.” He forced the gas pedal down to the floorboards.
Long seconds after the shooting had stopped, the old man who had abandoned his car to the fugitives lay facedown in the gutter where he had fallen, hands clamped over his head. Then, slowly, as the strange new silence gave way to shouts and the sound of running feet, he raised his head, looked around, and pushed himself painfully up off the street, brushing dirt, water, and bits of glass from his soiled suit. Uniformed police officers were running all about him, some, like himself, showing signs of having spent a long time off their feet, the knees of their blue trousers dirty and worn. They all had guns in their hands.
The street in front of the bank was a shambles. Automobiles were parked everywhere; on the sidewalks, along the curb, straddling the center lane, their doors and windows and headlights shot full of holes, leaning at crazy angles on their blown tires, gasoline leaking from their pierced tanks, steam gushing from their smashed radiators. A few of the officers were seated behind the wheels of their damaged patrol cars, grinding away at the starters in fruitless attempts to get their cracked engines running. A motorcycle patrolman cursed and strained as he tried to push his overturned vehicle back onto its two wheels.
The old man stopped to look down at the body lying in a contorted position at his feet. Like the policeman who lay sprawled at the foot of the bank steps a few yards away, the dead man’s face had been shot to pieces. Bits of flesh and bone splinters were stuck to the blood-splattered bulletproof vest just beneath his chin. His cap had slid down so that most of his torn features were mercifully concealed, and the old man didn’t care to pick it up and see any more. He looked so young.
The foot patrolman whose revolver shots had thrown the bank robbers off balance and into the path of his comrades’ fire in the first place came over to see the body. He glanced down at the half-hidden face, looked over in the direction of the slain motorcycle cop, and spat on the bulletproof vest. Then he turned and was sick all over his shoes.
Chapter Fifteen
“The largest manhunt in the history of Missouri is under way today for Virgil Ballard, the infamous Tri-State Terror, who, with six members of his gang, robbed the First National Bank of Kansas City yesterday afternoon, slaying Officer Malcolm Jackson and escaping with an undetermined amount of cash. The pitched battle raged for twenty-seven minutes, during which—”
Virgil snapped off the radio of the freshly stolen Auburn and pulled out to pass a slow-moving Model T produce truck. He left it behind in a swirl of dust from the pavement. “Undetermined amount of cash! You hear that? They can’t count a lousy twelve thousand.” He steered back into the right lane, just missing a head-on collision with a big Franklin going in the other direction. The angry driver gave him a blast with his air horn.
“Yeah,” agreed Alex, after his heart had started beating again. “They got the number of the gang wrong too.”
“They didn’t even mention Boyd.”
“You didn’t give them a chance.”
Virgil stared at the road for a minute. Then he looked at Alex. “You figure they killed him?”
“Yeah.”
They came in view of a bicyclist pedaling down the edge of the road in the same direction they were going. He was wearing an argyle jersy and knickers, and wore a cap at a cockeyed angle that left the bill low over his left eye. He turned his head, saw them, and wheeled closer to the edge. Virgil accelerated and shot past him, so close that th
e cyclist panicked, twisting the handlebars too quickly, and tipped over. Alex craned his neck around to watch him through the rear window. The rider and the vehicle were tangled together, the two upturned wheels spinning away at the empty air.
“Now what did you go and do that for?” Alex wanted to know.
“Don’t like two-wheelers,” Virgil answered.
“Look, Virge, why don’cha pull off to the side so we can take a nap?”
“What for? I’m not sleepy.”
“I am.”
“So sleep. Who’s stopping you?”
“I’m afraid I might not wake up again. Look, why the hurry?”
Virgil shot the car straight past the upcoming curve and onto a narrow gravel road, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust. “I got my eye on a bank in Oklahoma. I wanna hit it before noon.”
“Another one?” Alex’s eyes opened wide. “After what just happened?”
“So we hit some hard luck. That don’t mean we should give up robbing altogether, does it?”
“On the level. Why another one so soon after the last one? We got enough to live on for a while.”
“I want to get together enough so we can lay up for a long stretch.”
“Then what?”
Virgil clenched his teeth. “Then I’m gonna come back to Missouri and kill Roscoe Hunter.” He rumbled on down the road, trailing a ribbon of brown dust and gravel.
Roscoe Hunter trotted down the steps of the building where he kept his apartment in Kansas City, tossed his heavy brown suitcase into the back seat of the DeSoto, got into the driver’s seat, and drove off. The radio, which he had left on when he parked the car, warmed up and the announcer’s doomsday voice thundered from the round speaker: “… pitched battled raged for twenty-seven minutes, during which gang member James Boyd Harriman lost his life to the merciless justice of the Kansas City Police. Virgil Ballard and the rest of his gang escaped in a stolen vehicle belonging to Ralph Budge, 76, of Independence. More news following this message of interest from Bristol-Meyers, makers of—”
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