Baraclough was gaunt, dour, with a twisted sense of humor and curious areas of indifference and sensitivity. He paid great attention to such things as good manners and good diction, and his humor was the self-deprecating kind that often went with a high order of intelligence. He was also capable of gratuitous cruelties: he treated the cocktail waitress like a lower form of life-“Have you thought of having that moustache removed, dear?”-but he left her a lavish tip.
After a while it occurred to Walker that the two men worked well together because they complemented each other: each filled gaps in the other’s capacities. They were both cruel men but their brutalities were of different kinds.
Baraclough’s sadistic streak was deliberate and malicious and he enjoyed exercising it, but he only did it when the circumstances gave him the edge so that there was no likelihood of retaliation against him.
Hargit’s cruelty was that of the predatory carnivore. A matter of indifference. It never occurred to him to be concerned about other people’s feelings. Hawked, lithe, violent, charismatic-he had the roughshod instincts of a jungle cat, and the grace.
They drove to Reno with only two gas stops and a half-hour in Las Vegas for lunch. Baraclough did most of the talking, filling Walker in; Baraclough was the one who handled details. He was a superb driver: he kept the needle right on the speed limit and when he had to pass on narrow roads he did it smoothly with no great bursts of power and no sudden braking.
Burt was waiting for them in Reno. Walker remembered him now that he saw him. Burt had a shaven head and a waxy, slightly concave face and the build of an oil drum. He had the stolid unimaginative personality of a career master sergeant, which he had been; the threads on the sleeve of his khaki shirt showed where he had carried nine reenlistment hashmarks.
The house Burt had rented was one of those week-by-week rentals Reno served up to people who set up “permanent” Nevada residences for six weeks to get their divorces. It was six miles out of town, a thirty-year-old hunting cabin set back a mile off the highway in scrub timber, out of sight of neighbors. It had two bedrooms and a large paneled front room with stone fireplace and exposed rafters that gave it the look of a hunting lodge. Hanratty, the fifth man, had arrived a day earlier by plane from Los Angeles and Burt had picked him up at the airport. They had two cars among them-Hargit’s Lincoln Continental and a Plymouth that Burt had rented from a Reno agency.
Hanratty was a narrow lizard of a man who had been up the river more times than an anxious salmon-a three time ex-con. It turned out he was Eddie Burt’s ex-brother-in-law: Burt’s sister had divorced him during his second prison term. Hanratty had a narrow face, rough, pitted all over, the hue of veal. His nose was a teapot snout and he looked as if he had been assembled out of leftover mismatched parts-fat legs and hips, a short torso, matchstick arms and a small nervous face. He talked with his teeth together as ex-convicts invariably do, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a ventriloquist. He was never without a large revolver.
The reason for Hanratty’s presence became gradually clear: he was the one who had proposed the operation.
They had released him from the Florence penitentiary eight months ago and the parole department had helped get him a job in the San Miguel smelter. The company bank’s Friday afternoon ritual had drawn his attention from the start. He had begun to think about getting in touch with some of the professionals he’d met in stir but in the meantime he’d run into his former brother-in-law in a Las Vegas casino and somehow the conversation had worked its way around to the San Miguel bank-Hanratty had a habit, he kept talking until he found something to say-and Burt had introduced him to the Major. After that it had been inevitable that the Major would take over.
The others had already been over the ground. Baraclough had Polaroid photographs of the bank and the street. That first night in Reno they sat around the kitchen table and the Major filled in the details of the plan, using a No. 2 pencil as a pointer, outlining the campaign like a field general giving instructions to his battalion commanders.
The next day Baraclough had driven him to the airport to show him one of the planes they were going to use. “We’ll use two planes because they may get a fix on the first one. Anybody could spot us-there’s always that vulnerable moment just after you take off. Once they know we’re using a plane they’ll figure we’re heading for Mexico. That’s where we’ll have the edge on them. We’ll change planes here-we’ll have to set up a second plane, something with enough range to get us up into Canada across the Idaho border. We’ve already set up a landing strip in British Columbia.”
“How long?”
“The strip? Four thousand feet. One of the lumber outfits used to use it. It’s on the weedy side but it’ll do, I checked it out myself last week.” They were sitting in the Plymouth beside the runway; Baraclough had his arm across the back of the seat. “I thought I’d leave the choice of the second plane up to you.”
The plane beside the hangar was a Piper twin Apache. “Where’d you get the money to buy that one?”
“Who bought it? I rented it in Pasadena under a phony name. We hired a pilot to fly it up here for us and I told him we’d get in touch with him when we needed him again. He thinks it’s something to do with a rich man’s divorce case. They do that all the time around here, people hiring private planes to sneak in and out of the state while they’re supposedly living here establishing six weeks’ residence.” Baraclough took the key out of the ignition and opened the door. “You’ll want to have a look at her.”
Walker went over to the plane with him. A mechanic working on a Cessna gave them an incurious glance and went back to work, standing on a ladder propped against the cowling.
It looked all right but appearances didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t tell much about an airplane by kicking the tires. “You got a key to it?”
Baraclough supplied one and Walker climbed inside, unlocked the glove box on the inside door panel and had a look at the logbooks: three of them-one for the airframe, one for each engine. The plane had quite a few hours on it since its last overhaul. One explosion per cylinder for every two rpm’s-after 460 hours, how many explosions? The plane had something like fifteen thousand parts. Walker shook his head. “I’d like to take her up and try her out.”
“Tomorrow. We’ll get your documentation fixed up and you can tell the tower you’re a Los Angeles pilot we hired. Now what about the other plane? What’ll we need?”
They discussed it and settled on a twin Beech. “If we can find one for rent.”
“If we can’t,” Baraclough said, “we’ll just have to steal one, won’t we.”
8
The Major and Baraclough obtained hand grenades and the Mace chemical spray cans from a Guard Armory near Sacramento. They drove over by way of Tahoe and pulled the Inspecting Officer bit. The National Guard sergeant on duty had been conditioned to demand identifications and passes from everyone who tried to get in but the Army had started earlier and spent longer conditioning him to salivate properly to the sound of a high-ranking officer’s voice, and Hargit’s bluff carried them through. He brought out three grenades and four cans of the chemical in a canvas AWOL bag and the sergeant gave him a smart salute as he left.
There was a suitable Beech for rent in Salt Lake and Burt drove Walker up there to pick it up. Walker was nervous around airports-there were bound to be people around who would recognize him-but he kept his head down and let Burt take care of the paperwork. They brought the Beech back and set it down on a meadow near the rented cabin. Burt went into town, rented a tank truck and brought aviation fuel out to the meadow to fill up the Beech’s tanks.
Wednesday afternoon-D-day minus two-Baraclough left Reno alone, driving the Lincoln. They were going to use it for their getaway car and abandon it afterward. Walker was surprised by that until Baraclough explained they had stolen it in the first place. They had cruised a rich El Paso residential neighborhood one evening until they’d found a house where there was a big party. People often left keys in their cars at parties because they didn’t want their carp to block the driveway. Hargit had picked out the big new Lincoln and they had driven it to Las Cruces, repainted it, and put a pair of Arizona plates on it that had come off a one hundred fifty dollar flivver Burt had bought in Willcox under a fake name. It seemed a lot of money to spend on a pair of plates but this way the license number wouldn’t be listed on any police blotter of stolen car numbers. They parked the flivver in a pay lot in Tucson
