Red Highway (15 page)

“Well, like I said, no guarantees.”

They turned and came abreast of the bank once again. The van was still there. “What now?” said Roscoe. “There's no place to park.”

“Double-park it next to the van.” Virgil studied the busy bank entrance.

“What if a cop comes along?”

“We'll worry about the cops.”

“Yeah, but what'll I do if they tell me to move the car?”

“Move it.”

Roscoe slid the car in next to the van and set the brake. Virgil swung open his door and put one foot on the running board. Then he turned to the driver. “Keep the motor running. If a cop comes anywhere near the bank, touch the horn three times, fast. Lightly. If they find out you're here, we're all dead. Got it?”

Roscoe nodded vigorously.

“Okay, c'mon.” The order was snapped to Boyd and Alex in the back seat. They gathered their weapons and got out on both sides, Boyd having difficulty because of the heavy vest. Then they stepped between the battered van and a two-year-old Packard eight parked in front of it and mounted the low steps to the entrance.

Virgil was first through the revolving door, his thirty-one-shot Luger held out in front of him. Then came Alex and Boyd, machine guns cradled, and spread out on both sides of the entrance. The bank was full of people.

“This is a stickup,” announced Virgil loudly. “Everybody get their hands in the air and nobody'll get hurt.”

A woman customer began screaming and couldn't stop. Some of the customers near Virgil made a dash for the door, but Boyd's machine gun stopped them. In his low cap and big raincoat open to reveal the quilted vest, he looked extremely menacing. They backed away from him, hands raised.

Virgil pointed his Luger at the pretty stenographer who sat petrified behind her little desk near the door, and waved it in the direction of the others huddled along the left wall. “You. Over there.”

The girl sprang to her feet and fled across the room, high heels clacking on the checkerboard floor.

“Cut out that damn squawking!” Virgil swung the gun in the direction of the screaming woman. She couldn't stop. A little, gray-suited man at her side, probably her husband, clamped a hand over her mouth and choked it off.

The bank president, a man in his forties with graying hair and a small moustache, stood behind the varnished wooden gate that closed off his cubicle, hands held so high that the sleeves of his expensive jacket had slid down almost to his elbows. Two beefy forearms and the striped material of his shirt were exposed. “Open the vault,” said Virgil, stepping through the gate. The president hastened to comply, leading the way around in back of the tellers' cages toward the enormous round vault door recessed into the rear wall. They passed a group of workmen clad in overalls, who had stopped their work on the half-finished pine partition they were building between the cages and the president's cubicle in order to raise their hands. “What's going on here?” said Virgil, pausing before a carpenter with a large paunch that hung over where his belt would have been if he had been wearing one.

“They're doing some remod—” began the bank president, but Virgil cut him off by jabbing his gun at him.

“I was asking
him
.” Virgil glanced at the man with the paunch, expecting an answer.

The workman said shakily, “We're puttin' a wall 'twixt the tellers an' the president.”

“How come?”

“
He
ordered it.” The carpenter nodded at the executive.

“What's the matter?” demanded Virgil, turning back to the president. “You figure maybe you're too good to associate with your employees? You're better than they are?”

The president stared at the gun the robber was pointing at his groin. “That's not true,” he protested. “It's only to provide some privacy—”

“Privacy! Hah!”

“—Provide some privacy for the bank's customers. Savings accounts are very personal things, one must protect confidences—”

Virgil said, “I don't like it. Tear it down.”

The carpenters stared at him, blinking.

“Didn't you hear me? I said tear it down!” He pointed the gun at the workmen.

Alex said, “Aw, Virgil, for Christ's sake—”

“Shut up!” snapped the other, and planted the muzzle of his Luger in the bank president's soft stomach. The executive grunted. “Now, if you bastards don't start tearing down that goddamn un-American partition by the time I count three, I'm gonna blast this man's guts all over the back wall. One!”

The carpenters snatched up their tools and began working furiously at the unfinished wall, wrenchingly tearing the clean white boards from the frame. Nails screeched and wood splintered as a particularly ambitious workman scurried along the partition, slamming his claw hammer into the bottom of the boards and loosening them, unmindful of the damage he was doing. The hammer blows reverberated like gunshots around the high-ceilinged lobby.

When the destruction was well under way, Virgil stood back and smiled with satisfaction. “That's more like it,” he said, and spun the bank president around so that he could place his gun barrel against the man's spine. “Okay, you capitalist swine, the vault.” He marched him toward the big steel door.

Out in the car, Roscoe Hunter had just snapped off the radio when he heard the hammer blows resounding from inside the bank and thought they were gunshots. He sat up straight, heart pounding, and stared toward the entrance through the side windows of the van beside which he was parked. Fifteen seconds went by, then thirty, and nobody came out the door. After a full minute, he figured the entire gang had been killed or captured. The motorcycle cop puttering up the street toward him confirmed it. He had been sent out to pick up the wheel man.

Roscoe released the hand brake and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The car lurched, the engine coughed and died. He started it again and took off, this time successfully. The big DeSoto left the curb in a flurry of squealing rubber and roared down the street right past the motorcycle cop, fishtailing wildly on the slick wet asphalt. It barreled around the corner on two wheels and was gone.

The motorcycle patrolman stopped and turned in his seat as the two-toned bomb sped past, and wondered what was going on. The bank was just up the street, on the left. He decided to go in there and check it out, just in case.

Inside the bank, the president fiddled with the big combination knob on the vault, his hand shaking so badly that his fingers kept sliding off.

“Come on, you fat bastard, hurry it up.” Virgil kept jabbing him with his gun.

“I'm trying,” protested the president. “I'm nervous. I keep going past the number.”

“Well, get it. You want to foul up our neat schedule?”

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.