“Still makes me nervous,” Van Meter said. “Gonna be a lot of people in the street, Friday afternoon. Payday, all that.”
“Nobody’s gonna get hurt,” Dillinger said flatly. “They’ll lay down like a buncha tank fighters. Four minutes, we’re on our way to Indy. Time they get themselves together and call the C-men we’ll be halfway there. It’ll take the feds three, four hours to drive down there from Chicago.”
“How about the state cops?” Pierpont asked.
“They can’t find their nose with their hanky,” Dillinger answered.
“Damn one-horse town,” Van Meter mumbled.
“With the fattest bank in Indiana and three cops in the whole town counting the sheriff.”
“I’m for that,” said Clark. “Look what happened to Charlie Mackle, messing with the G-boys.”
“Charlie was a damn fool,” Dillinger said with a touch of irritation. “Walks right into Melvin Purvis who’s sittin’ with a tommygun in his lap. Listen here, this Purvis ain’t just an ordinary G-man, he’s nuts. Hoover gave him a clean hand to get rid of us all. I don’t care to mess with those people, do you?”
Nobody answered.
“So we keep to the small towns with the fat banks.”
“Maybe we oughta retire,” Pierpont said.
“We got two hundred bucks, if we’re lucky that is, between the five of us and you want to retire,” Van Meter said and laughed. “You going to Rio on fifty bucks, Harry?”
“I mean hit a string of ‘em. Maybe run down the line, catch four, five banks in one day and call it quits.”
“Won’t work,” Dillinger said, shaking his head. “Gives Purvis and his boys time to get a line on us. Hit and run, hit and run, that’s the way. Keep ‘em off balance.”
“I say we go in blasting, kill anybody that twitches and shoot our way out. Scare the shit outa everybody,” said Nelson.
“You keep that chatterbox of yours down, hear me, Lester?” Dillinger said in his hardest voice. “This town’s just barely breathin’. They ain’t gonna give us any trouble.”
“Know what I heard?” Pierpont said. “I heard Purvis always lights a cigar before he goes after somebody. Calls it a birthday candle. He’s supposed to have a list of twenty-two guys. Says when he’s got twenty-two candles on his cake, he’s gonna throw a party.”
“Twenty-two,” Dillinger said. “Wouldn’t you know it would be twenty-two.”
“Got himself a machine gun squad, now,” Nelson said. “His motto’s ‘show ‘em no mercy.’”
“College kids,” Dillinger said. “Jump a foot when their shoes squeak. The whole thing with Purvis is, Floyd and his bunch killed a federal man when they hit Jelly Nash in Kansas City. The guy was a personal friend of Purvis.”
“What d’ya mean, hit Jelly? They was trying to spring him,” Pierpont said.
“No way. Conco told me himself. They wanted to get rid of Nash, he had the talkies. The cops got trigger-happy and they ended up knocking over Nash
“And that kicked Purvis off his rocker?”
‘1 guess so. He’s got a very short fuse.”
“So let’s not light it when he’s in the room,” Pierpont said. Dillinger laughed. “That’s good, Harry.”
“What’s the name of this bank again?”
“The Drew City Farmer’s Trust and Mortgage Bank.”
“How big’s the town?”
“Three thousand or so, most of ‘em farmers out in the field. The town’s two blocks long, bank’s in the middle of town. I doubt there’s two hundred autos in the whole county.”
“What’re they gonna chase us with, horses and buggies?” Clark snickered.
“Yeah. Like Jesse James,” Nelson answered.
“Shut up and listen. This is the setup,” Dillinger said. He took out a sheet of typing paper with a sketch of the bank and held it up for all to see. “The bank’s on the corner, door faces the intersection, kind of catty-corner. The cages are on the left when you go in. Big shots are in an open area on the right. The teller windows are three feet high, so we use a pyramid. I’ll take the door and the stopwatch. Go for twenties and under, you know how tough it is to pass a C-note these days. Homer and Lester work the vault, Harry and Russell clean out the tellers’ windows. We’ll drive through town once, check it out, then drop off Lester and Harry, then Homer and me. Russ parks the car in front of the bank. Remember, once we’re in, we got four minutes.”
“How about guards?” Pierpont asked.
“One old-timer in the bank.”
“He’s about seventy,” said Van Meter. “Probably can’t see past his nose.”
Dillinger went on. “The cop station’s two blocks away. There’s a phone box here, just inside the bank door, I’ll take care of that. We’ll call in a fake accident from up the highway here, that’ll get the sheriff outa town. So we got two cops and grandpa in the bank.” He chuckled. “Hell, boys, we got ‘em outnumbered.”
The young policeman ducked into the b.ank and shook the rain off his raincoat. He walked across the floor with his weekly scrip check in hand and presented it to Dempsey for his initials. Luther Conklin was a local boy who had played football in high school, then spent two years at the state college. He was Tyler Oglesby’s deputy. He had
