Barney was an old lag. He knew he'd have long white whiskers before he made it outside again, if he ever made It. Go for yourself, kid, he said to me as we stood in the farmyard with our hands in the air. I'll back your play.
I'd left my gun inside beside Clem's body. That scored the deputy to Clem. I told the mob scene that surrounded us that I was a hitchhiker who'd been sleeping in the barn when the bankrobbers took over, and I stuck to it. True to his word, Barney backed me up. The police didn't believe It, but the jury came close. Identification putting me inside the bank was fuzzy. The guilty verdict was lukewarm.
Even the judge was leaning. I had no rap sheet. They'd checked my prints from Hell to Hoboken, and they couldn't come up with even a speeding charge. Two things licked me with the judge, finally. I wasn't using my family name, of course, and the probation officer couldn't get a line on me. The judge refused to believe I'd sprung fullblown from the earth at age twenty-three without previous documentation of some kind. Also—and fatally—I could produce no visible means of support.
The judge cleared his throat and said three-to-five. I think he'd been considering probation. Barney Pope drew twenty-to-life. We weren't tried for the deputy. There was a double-barreled question of jurisdiction and identification. The local DA didn't want to give up his headlines by letting us face the murder charge. They wrote off the deputy to Clem.
I hadn't graduated overnight to a five-man bank detail. I'd come up the ladder—filling stations, theater box offices, liquor stores—the whole bit. I worked alone until I met Nig Rosen. Nig talked me into the Massillon job. I guess I was flattered. I was by far the youngest of the five.
We worked four months on the job. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Parts of it I didn't like, instinctively it seemed. Afterward I knew I was right. Complicated action with a bunch of hot sparks was no good. Even before we were hit I'd decided what I wanted in the future was a deal I could control myself.
I had plenty of time in the gow to figure how it was going to be the next time. Doc Essegian was my cellmate from the middle of my second year ©n. Everyone called him The Doctor, maybe because he was such a wise old owl. He was certainly no medical doctor.
The first three months Doc never even said good morning to me. Then I had a little trouble with one of the screws. When I came back from solitary, Doc laughed at me. 'Don't let it burn a hole in your gut, kid,' he advised me. 'You're a better hater than me, even, and that's saying something.'
After that he kind of took me over. 'Life is the big machine, kid,' he'd growl at me in his after-lights-out rasp. 'It chews you up and it spits you out. Don't ever forget it.'
He had the most completely acid outlook on life I'd ever encountered. He really knew the score. He was consumptive to his toenails, but over the years he'd given them so much trouble inside they wouldn't certify him to the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Each day he systematically coughed up a little more of his lungs while grinning and thumbing his nose. Don't bother telling me it's impossible for our pure-minded prison authorities to function in such a cold-blooded manner. I was there.
I'd have applied for parole when I was eligible if it hadn't been for Doc. Go ahead, if you can't tough it out, he told me. But remember this: the minute you do it you're the yo-yo on the end of the string. The least little thing you do they don't like, they'll twitch the string and back you come. Do the bit, he urged me. Go out clean. Spit in their eye. Get a decent job, something you can't do with a parole officer checking on you every time you turn around.
You're young, Doc said. Develop something you can work at once in a while and show as a means of a support when a prosecutor wants to put you over the jumps. Put in time on the job every so often. Keep a name clean to work under, because when a judge hears no visible means of support, you're gone.
I'd been that route, so I knew he was right. I had an even better reason for listening to him, though. Barney Pope had hidden the swag from the bank job before we'd been funneled to the farmhouse, and it had never been recovered. I knew where it was, and Barney knew where it was. Nobody else. The cops had never found it, at least not publicly. A cop working alone could have tapped the till. A man never knows about that until he gets back for a look.
I knew they'd never found it officially because every three months I had a visit from the FBI. They came in pairs, always. Sharp boys, smooth dressers, with faces like, polished steel. I used to wonder if they came in pairs to eliminate the chance of my splitting with a single man after making a deal.
Each time they came we'd go over the same old tired routine about the whereabouts of the boodle. I always insisted I was an innocent hitchhiker caught up in the middle of a police-bank robber gunfight. They knew better, but they couldn't crack me.
I found out Doc was right the first time they came back after I was eligible for parole. They turned me upside down about why I hadn't applied. I told them I liked it where I was. That moved me up a few notches on their list.
Anyway, I did the bit. The day I walked out of that stinking hole I didn't have to say, 'Mister' to any man. And I'd made up my mind: I wasn't going back. Regardless of what it took, I wasn't ever going back.
The day I left an FBI tail picked me up at the front gate. I rode with it until he got to thinking it was a breeze. The second day I triple-doored him in a hotel lobby and lost him. I thought that was that, but give the devil his due. They located me at my first two jobs. I wasn't on parole, but I lost the jobs. I had to figure they didn't want me working so I'd be driven back to the swag.
I finally shook them by traveling up into the Pacific Northwest and hooking on in a lumber camp. I never saw street lights for a year and a half. The work damn near killed me at first, but I got to enjoy it. And I practiced with a handgun almost every day. When I came out of there, I could handle a crosscut saw and a double-bitted ax with the best of them, and with a gun I could do things people pay to see.
I drifted into tree work later on. It seemed a natural for part-time work. It helped in getting a closeup look at places I was interested in, like banks. When I worked, I worked hard. I had no trouble catching on with a tree crew anytime I wanted a job.
I waited three years before I went back for the Massilon loot I didn't need the money—I'd had two good popovers bat k to hack but it seemed about time. The farmhouse was pair and the farm cut up into a subdivision. I had to buy a lot to do it, but I got the swag. The deed to the lot is still in a safety deposit box in the Riverman's Trust Company in ('Cincinnati.
Long before that I'd arranged with a shyster lawyer to send Barney Pope fifty a month, supposedly from an inheritance. Fifty a month is all a man is allowed to spend in a federal pen. Once I learned via the grapevine that the lawyer had missed sending it three months in a row. I made a flying trip cross-country to see him, and he never missed again.
In jail I used to read nights before lights-out. It was at Doc's insistence at first. Learn something, you stupid lunkhead, Doc would say to me. He had two gods, the dictionary and the encyclopedia. I read aloud to him from both because he had incipient cataracts. He could have had them operated on, but I think he was afraid to let them work on him while he had any light left.
An encyclopedia article would start him talking. He'd been everywhere and seen everything, twice. There was no degree from the school I attended, but I'd have had to be a complete jerk not to learn.
Doc had been a bank man himself. A blaster of the old dynamite and nitro school, when they still carried the nitro in flasks. He wasn't afraid to admit the world had passed him by. Forget the gangs, he told me. Forget the big, involved jobs that get hung up on the first weak link. Two good men is all it takes, he insisted. When you move, smash them. Never let up on the pressure. Never take a backward step once you're committed.
I listened, and I learned. While I was up in the lumber camp getting the smell of the FBI blown off me, I worked it all out down to the last few decimal places. I divorced myself for all time from the vault-blowing jobs and the armored-truck jobs. That was the hard way. A fast, clean operation: that's what I wanted. Hit-and-run. Smash-and-grab. Give them a look for a hundred-fifty seconds, average, with the disadvantage of surprise.
When I left the West Coast I drove to Atlantic City and looked up Bosco Sheerin. Bosco liked the sound of what I had to say. I was younger than he was, but he was a happy-go-lucky type, and he made no objection to my calling the plays. We had a run that was peaches-and cream until one night in Philadelphia the husband of Bosco's blonde girl friend came home early. Bosco wound up on a morgue slab with foreign matter in his gizzard, and I needed a new partner.
I picked up someone whenever I needed a man. I'm no big liver. I had a shack in Colorado at timberline on the road up to Pike's Peak. In June it would snow half the mornings, and in August there were still drifts in the
