The Hunt

endure- his sadistic games for the right price. He had been thinking about taking the trip for several days. The need was building in him.

He decided he would bring up the trip to Chicago again and accept Louise’s offer of the car for the weekend— after a reasonable protest, of course. It might be interesting for a change, cruising the streets of Chicago, looking for something different.

As he walked home in the rain, Dempsey thought about what he had learned about Americans in the nine months since he had come to Drew City. They were generous. Too trusting. Good friends when they got to know you. They were crazy for fads. They loved sports and entertainment and elevated ballplayers and movie actors, even the very rich, to a kind of royalty status. They were radically independent. Their slang expressions changed from one place to the next, impossible to keep up with. Everyone went to church on Sunday. They all seemed to have an unusual fascination with the weather. And the entire nation seemed to gather around their radios every night.

But most encouraging of all, thought 27 with satisfaction, they were complacent.

Indiana Highway 29, a long, slender finger of concrete, stretched south from Logansport to Indianapolis under a bleak and threatening sky. A black Packard hummed toward the town of Delphi, its five passengers dressed in suits and dark felt hats except for the man sitting in the front next to the driver. John Dillinger wore a straw boater, which had become somewhat of a trademark for him.

“Car’s hummin’ like a bee, Russ,” Dillinger said to the driver.

“Put in new plugs and points, new air filter.

“Can the crap, okay?” Lester Gillis, who called himself Big George but was known to the world as Baby Face Nelson, growled from the backseat. “I wouldn’t know a spark plug from the queen of hearts and I don’t wanna”

“Everybody straight on the plan?” Dillinger said, leaning sideways in the seat and facing the three in the back. They all nodded confidently. “We need to go over it again?”

“Nah, we got it, fer Chrissakes,” Nelson said.

“You can be a real pain in the ass, y’know that, Lester,” said Dillinger.

“Don’t call me that. I told you, I like to be called George.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” the driver chuckled. “I suppose if your name was George you’d want us to call you Percy.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Awright, awright,” Dillinger said. “No need to get hot. We got work to do.”

Nelson settled back and shook his shoulders. His short temper overrode a lifelong inferiority complex—he was only five-four, and he resented the fact that Dillinger was the most wanted man in America when Nelson felt he rightfully should have been Public Enemy Number One. But his own gang had been shot out from under him and he couldn’t operate alone. He calmed down.

“How come you do all this planning?’ he asked Dillinger.

“Learned it from the expert.”

“Who’s that?”

“Herman K. Lamm.”

“Who?” Homer Van Meter asked, speaking for the first time since breakfast.

“Herman Lamm. You ought to know that name, he’s the father of modern bank robbery. When you say you’re takin’ it on the lam? That expression is named for Herman Lamm. Robbed banks for thirteen years before they grabbed him.”

“C’mon,” Van Meter said skeptically.

“Where’d you meet him?” Nelson asked.

“Didn’t. You remember Walter Dietrich?”

“Yeah, retired, didn’t he?”

“Laying low,” Dillinger said. “I knew ‘Wally when I did my first stretch at Michigan City. He ran with Herman Lamm for thirteen years. Thirteen years without gettin’ caught. Lamm’s secret was planning, execution and speed. He cased everything, drew plans just like mine, never stayed on the spot more’n four minutes. And he always knew how to get out.”

Dillinger was a man of average height with thinning dishwater-blond hair, dyed black, and a high forehead. His intense blue eyes were disguised by gold-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. And although Dillinger had spent painful hours having his fingerprints altered with acid and his face lifted, vanity prevailed. Dillinger was a ladies’ man and he continued to sport the thin mustache ladies loved and which, with the pie-shaped straw hat, was his trademark.

The other men in the car were Harry Pierpont, a dapper, gaunt man who liked to be called “Happy’ Homer Van Meter, who said very little and had been with Dillinger the longest; and Russell Clark, a lean, hard-looking man who some people thought resembled Charles Lindbergh. Clark was an ex-mechanic and a fine driver.

Van Meter, Clark and Dillinger were old pals. Nelson was a latecomer to the gang and Dillinger was having serious second thoughts about him. Nelson liked to kill and had done so many times, a violation of one of John Dillinger’s unwritten laws—no killing. Thus far Nelson had violated the rule only once—he had killed a cop while trying to rescue Dillinger from the police. Dillinger could hardly complain.

“What’s the name of this town again?” Russell Clark asked.