Handsome Harry (11 page)

I hadn’t seen that much of a woman’s legs in nine years—never mind a female rump or a furpatch—and I had a hard-on for the rest of the day. That night I tossed and turned for I don’t know how long before I finally quit fighting it and jacked off so I could get to sleep.

Before breakfast the next morning I peeled the banana and bit into it and chewed a time or two before realizing something wasn’t right and spitting the mush into my hand. In it was a tightly rolled pair of ten-dollar bills.

I told the others about the money but not about the show John gave me. That merry little incident always stayed between the two of us.

D
uring the next month he hit two banks, one in Montpelier, Indiana, and the other in Blufton, Ohio. Pearl said Montpelier was a Sonny Sheetz set-up and went smooth as glass. The newspaper claimed the bandits took twelve thou but the real take was seven.

Blufton was a different story. John did that one because he’d gotten a tip that it was fat, but he’d been misinformed and the take was only two thousand. What’s more, the bank alarm started ringing while he was in the vault and his partners panicked. They ran outside and started shooting up and down the street to ward off the curious. It didn’t help their nerves a bit when a waterworks whistle suddenly started wailing. It did that every day at noon, but John and his guys didn’t know that, though they should have. They shot holes in store windows and windshields and generally scared the beans out of the citizens until John came out and they piled into the car and took off. John told Pearl the job didn’t take five minutes but between the bank alarm and the waterworks whistle and his rattled partners’ gunfire it sounded like a battle in a crazy house.

As she told me all this, I was thinking
Jesus
he’s having a swell time.

Sonny was arranging a fat set-up for him a couple of weeks down the road and John was sure the take from that job would do the trick. He’d said to tell me he’d have everything arranged by the middle of September.

T
he set-up turned out to be in Indianapolis. John made away with fifteen grand, although the bank claimed twenty-five. He told Pearl to let us know that Harry Copeland had been with him on most of his jobs, including this one. She hadn’t met Copeland, but Russell and I knew him from years back when he’d done a short fall in M City. His name had been on the list of contacts we’d given John. Russell had recently heard from his girlfriend Opal that Copeland was living in Chicago and dating her sister. Everybody called him Knuckles because the three middle fingers of his right hand had been broken so bad they now looked like they had an extra set of joints. He’d never told any of us how it happened, but Russell had seen fingers like that before, on a guy he’d known back in De
troit who once worked as a drop man for the local outfit. One day the guy was late delivering a cash payment of some sort and the tardiness cost his boss an extra day’s interest. The boss was so displeasured he had a goon hold the guy’s hand in a dresser drawer and then he kicked the drawer shut.

Pearl snuck me a wadded news clipping that described the Indytown job as being skillfully professional. The reporter couldn’t conceal his admiration for the bandit who’d vaulted to the top of the cashiers’ cage and sat up there cross-legged and with his skimmer cocked over one eye while he held a gun on the manager below and announced the stickup.

Matt Leach was on the case, still promising the public a swift arrest.

When he read the clip, Charley said somebody had to have a serious talk with John about the gymnastics.

I said somebody would, and pretty soon, to judge by the look of things—and I gave them the rest of the news. Pearl had informed me that immediately after the Indy heist John had gone to see our man Williams in Chicago and paid him the five grand. He’d watched Williams put five pistols into a two-hundred-pound shipping crate of spooled thread and then reseal the lid on the crate. On one corner of the lid John carved an
X
the size of a two-bit piece and he darkened the
X
with a fountain pen. The mark distinguished that crate of thread from two others in the same shipment coming to the Gordon Shirt Company at the Michigan City penitentiary. The crates would arrive at the shirt company dock on the twenty-fifth of the month.

All right, Russell said,
now
we’re talking.

We agreed that if the guns came in on schedule we’d make the break on the first of October, a Sunday. We’d take some of the visitors hostage and use their cars to make our getaway.

I don’t know about you boys, I said, but I got my bags packed.

The next time I saw Pearl I filled her in and told her to inform John. She said sure, but she hadn’t seen him since right after he did the Indy job and had no idea when she’d see him again. He told her
that in addition to the Jenkins girl, who lived in Dayton, Ohio, he was also spending time with a Chicago girl named Billie Something. As far as Pearl knew, he hadn’t arranged any hideouts yet, but he had Knuckles Copeland scouting for places.

Up to now I’d kept Mary in the dark about our plan. The only people outside M City who were in on it were Pearl, John, and our man Williams in Chicago. By the time Pearl brought the news about the guns, however, I had decided Mary could be a lot of help, and the guys took my word she could be trusted.

She hadn’t been able to visit me in weeks because she’d been put in charge of the Sunday shift at the café, so I wrote a note saying Pearl’s a friend and signed it and rolled it into a little wad, and during our next visit I slipped it to Pearl through the screen. I told her to go see Mary at home and lay the thing out. Frankly, I didn’t know if Mary would throw in with us or not. But if she chose to stay out of it, I knew she wouldn’t fink.

Later in the week I got a letter from her. It was the usual blah-blah about her job and how her mother and sister were doing, but that was all stuff to gull the censors. At the very end, she wrote that Aunt Pearl had dropped by the house to tell her of a vacation visit they would soon receive from distant family members they hadn’t seen in a long time. It sounds lovely, she wrote, and I know Cousin Earl is looking forward to it as much as I am.

So she was in. But she should’ve known better than to think Earl could come with us. His lung trouble had gotten steadily worse, and a month ago he’d been put in the prison hospital. He was still in there, and word had it he wouldn’t last another month. I supposed he hadn’t let her know how bad off he was.

S
ix days before the thread shipment was due to arrive, the warden ordered a lockdown and put the silent system in effect. Except for going to work or to eat we were kept in our
cells, and any man caught talking on the job or in the mess hall got put in solitary.

Nobody knew why the crackdown. The hacks were jumpier and grimmer than usual. We whispered to each other without moving our lips, all of us asking the same thing—What the hell’s going on? We were sweating plenty, wondering if somebody’d got wind of our plan. We figured the bosses weren’t on to us yet or we’d all be in the hole already, but they might’ve heard
something
and were closing in.

It wasn’t until the next day that word came through the grapevine that a package of three pistols had been flung over the wall bordering the athletic field. But the guns were found by somebody other than whoever they were meant for, and the finder ratted to the hacks. The warden still hadn’t found out who the pieces were intended for and he meant to keep the crackdown in effect until the malefactors were identified. He had put out public notice that the prison was under lockdown and visitation was canceled indefinitely.

Evidently we weren’t the only ones who thought the best way out of M City was with the help of a few guns, but whoever these guys were they had tried to bring them in by more direct means than ours.

At the mess table Russell whispered What’re the odds of
this
so close to our move?

Only fucken morons would try a stunt like that, Red said, and nobody argued the point.

There were shakedown inspections three times a day. Every cell house and factory and storeroom in the joint was searched with a fine-tooth comb. The guards never took their eyes off us while we were at work. Walt said he might not be able to sneak the guns out of the crate when they arrived, but even if he did manage it, the sort of shakedowns taking place would sure as hell uncover the pieces, no matter where he hid them. It looked like the plan was headed for a crash.

And then, on the fifth day of the crackdown, three guys from another cell house were tagged for the guns and all of them got put in
the hole. The lockdown and silent system were lifted. It was on a Sunday, so we were allowed out into the yard for the rest of the day. But the visiting ban stayed in effect and any visitors who showed up at M City were turned away at the front gate.

The yard was humming with excitement. We sat together in the bleachers and talked things over. The crates of thread were due the next day, but rumor had it the warden was still nervous about the past week and would probably have more shakedowns in the immediate days ahead. What’s more, the warden hadn’t said when visitation would be reinstated, so we couldn’t even be sure there would
be
any visitors the next Sunday for us to take hostage.

The way things stood, we all agreed it was too risky to wait that long.

All right, I said. The pieces come in tomorrow and we go out the day after.

If
the pieces come in tomorrow, Russell said.

They all looked at me.

They’ll be here, I said.

W
alt was on the loading dock when the shipment arrived. He signed for the three crates of thread and had a dock crew dolly them over to the storeroom. As soon as the crew left, he took a closer look and found the crate with the small circled
X
. He pried off the lid with a crowbar and started digging through the spools inside. But he couldn’t find any guns and he began to panic. Then he pulled out a spool that felt heavier than the others. Snugged deep inside the spool was a pistol. Four other spools had guns in them too. Walt wrapped three of the pieces in a large burlap sack and jammed the sack between the back of a storeroom locker and the wall. The other two guns he put in the lower tray of a tool box.

Three-eighty automatics, Walt said. Full magazine in each.

Woo,
Red said, that Johnny boy did it.

I didn’t say anything but they could probably all read it on my face: I
told
you.

T
he big day began with a chilly sunless morning under a sky the color of iron. It started to rain before we were done with breakfast, the kind of rain that looked like it would last all day. Perfect weather for our purpose.

The shirt factory storeroom was never unlocked until after breakfast, by which time the bunch of us were scattered all over M City at our jobs. We couldn’t get together to make our move until lunch brought us back to the mess hall. We made a show of eating and then we went out to the main yard about fifteen minutes before the hack whistles would signal it was time to get back to work. A breeze had kicked up and the guys in the yard were hunkered into their shirts with collars turned up against the blowing drizzle. The puddles looked like shards of dirty glass. We picked our way around them as we casually crossed over to the shirt factory and then went downstairs to the storeroom. It was full of shipping crates and tool lockers, empty cartons and tables stacked with new shirts ready for pickup.

A moment later I was holding a gun for the first time in nine years, and I felt like the world had suddenly turned right-side-up. As soon as the piece was in my hand, I knew that within the hour I’d be free or I’d be dead.

Walt, Red, Charley, and Russell got the other pistols. They looked half-crazed with exhilaration. We checked the magazines and worked the slides, jacking rounds in the chambers.

Oh baby, I
love
that sound, Russell said.

The resonance of authority, Fat Charley said. He was beaming like a jack-o’-lantern.

The hack whistles shrilled outside.

The only one looking unhappy was Okie Jack. His ulcers were
worse than ever and his face was pinched with the pain of them. He caught me staring at him and gave a weak smile. Ah shit, Pete, he said, I’m okay.

Anybody wants out, I said, now’s the time.

Go to hell, Pete, Red said.

I grinned back at him. After you, sir, after you.

All right, Walt said, here goes. He slipped his piece into his waistband under his shirt and he and Fox went up the stairs and out the door.

It felt like an hour but probably wasn’t ten minutes before Fox returned. As we’d planned, he brought the superintendent of the factory back with him, a guy named Stevens, telling him that Dietrich needed to see him right away about some kind of shipping mix-up. Stevens came down the stairs ahead of Fox and halted at the bottom step when he saw me and Red off to the side, holding pistols on him.

Oh God, he said, and dropped his clipboard.

Easy does it, George, Fox said, you’ll be all right.

We made him sit on a carton out of sight of the stairway and told him to keep his mouth shut.

After another eternal quarter-hour Walt got back. I knew who was with him as soon as I heard the voice say This better be good, Dietrich, or your ass is mud.

Albert Evans—the day captain. We’d expected Walt to come back with one of the hacks and here he came with Big Bertha himself. Russell knew the voice too, I could tell by his look. We heard their feet clumping down the stairs and Walt saying Listen, I
found
the hooch down here and I don’t want you guys thinking it’s mine.

As they got to the bottom of the stairs, I stepped out with my gun raised. Hey there, Bertha, I said.