“I ain’t the only one who messed up,” Little Ed defended himself. “How about Tuesday, for instance?”
The General turned his glare on Bobby. “No guts,” he agreed.
Their first attempt had been on Tuesday. Monday didn’t count, because they’d only cased the bank. On the way to the robbery, Bobby had lit a cigarette to steady his nerves, smoking through his stocking mask. Somehow a hot ash had flown up and started a run. By the time they got to the bank his nose was poking clear through a ladder of nylon threads. Little Ed couldn’t stop laughing, and Bobby refused to get out of the car.
Wednesday it rained, a real gully washer, like when six inches come down in five minutes. Little Ed and Bobby wanted to give it up or at least wait an hour. “Wet streets are dangerous,” Little Ed told the General. “If we have to make a fast getaway, we could end up pasted against a light pole.” The General said it wouldn’t be any more dangerous for them than for the cops. Little Ed wasn’t worrying about the cops — after all, they were paid to take chances — but the General wouldn’t listen.
When they got to the bank, they had another problem. The General had gotten the biggest gun he could find, and it kept slipping through his waistband. “The bigger the gun,” he insisted, “the scareder the hold-upees.” The second time the gun slid out his pant leg he thrust it into the grocery bag.
Little Ed kept his foot on the gas pedal, nursing a rough idle in case there was trouble, while the other two made a wild dash through the rain. Just as the General got up to the door the wet paper bag broke and the gun clattered down on the sidewalk.
Bobby turned and made a run for the car. The General hollered “Come back here!” but Bobby just ran faster and the General had to retreat. On the way back to where their own car was stashed, he kept muttering about flagrant insubordination and desertion in the face of the enemy.
Yesterday, Thursday, was the worst. Six blocks from the bank the car Little Ed had stolen sputtered on gas fumes and died of starvation. The General cussed a spell but he was not the kind to give up easy. He made them push the car into a filling-station line that stretched three-quarters of a block. There they waited, shoving the car up a length at a time in hundred-and-five-degree heat.
When they reached the pump, Little Ed was so wrung out he would have collapsed except he was too worried. Any second he expected some cop to spot the stolen car. A person never could tell when one of them might decide to spice up the hour with something besides traffic tickets.
“Fill ’er up,” the General ordered.
Little Ed admired how calm and collected the General was until he noticed a sadistic gleam in the attendant’s eyes and went back to worrying.
“I expect you’d like the windshield wiped and the spare tire checked. While I’m at it, I could vacuum the floor mats and empty the ashtrays.” The man wiped sweat from his face with an oily rag. “Hell, Mister, where you been?”
The General rankled at his tone. The boys could see he was doing a slow burn and ordinarily would have clobbered the guy. Fortunately, the General remembered that he had more important things to do.
“Just fill it, like I said. Unleaded.”
“Well, I am just real sorry, Mister.” His grin made the words a lie. “But you’re odd and today is even. As the Governor said — odds on odd and evens on even. Now, if you’ll just push that junk heap out of the way so I can wait on my legitimate customers—”
The General might have killed him then and there, Little Ed reflected, but half of Dallas County was leaning on their horns protesting the delay and several husky beardos from a van two cars back converged on the stolen car and gave it a shove. The next car moved up to the pumps and there was no way to get back in line.
By then the temperature was a hundred and nine, and if it had been up to Little Ed they’d have ditched the car on the spot, but the General insisted they push it to a shopping center so all the people who’d seen them might forget what they looked like before the car was found.
That was yesterday, a very bad day — and tomorrow the banks would be closed. If they were going to get that bank robbed it would have to be today.
“This time we’re going to do it right,” the General repeated. “Just like in the military. Map, synchronized watches, strategy, all that kind of stuff. You hear me, soldier?”
Both Little Ed and Bobby nodded and squatted on the floor beside an old Humble Oil Company map of Dallas. Bobby’s stubby fingers combed through his sun-bleached hair as he looked at it. Then he gave the General a pained look, his pale blue eyes narrowing with disbelief.
“Hell, General. That old thing don’t even have the LBJ Freeway on it.”
“Don’t make no difference.” The General’s voice was firm and commanding. “We ain’t gonna use the LBJ anyhow.” He pointed to an ‘X’ on the map with the busted billiard cue he used as his swagger stick. “We’re going to hit this here bank at thirteen hundred hours.”
Little Ed nodded. He had watched enough old war movies to know the General meant one o’clock.
“Thirteen is unlucky,” Bobby argued. “Couldn’t we go at eleven — or what’s wrong with two o’clock? They’d probably have more money.”
The General glared at Bobby. “I’m getting pretty tired of your insubordination, soldier. We go in at thirteen hundred. I got my reasons. This time we don’t make no mistakes like we did before. I got one of them department-store shopping bags, plastic so it don’t come apart, and we got ski masks instead of ladies’ stockings, so that’s all taken care of. What we have to do next is steal another car.” The General s dark beady eyes drilled into Little Ed. “Do I got to tell you to make sure it has gas?”
Little Ed shook his head, being meek and as obedient as he could.
“So, O.K.” The General’s stick skipped across the surface of the map to a spot marked ‘Y.’ “I want you to have the car here by 0930 or ten hundred — no later. It’s a supermarket parking lot. We switch license plates with something that looks a lot like our new wheels, so’s if the cops spot the car and run it we come up clean. You got that?”
Bobby grunted and Little Ed tried looking intelligent.
“Next we go to position ‘Z.’ ” His stick wavered uncertainly as he squinted at the map.
“It’s over there where the big North Park Shopping Mall is now,” Bobby pointed helpfully.
“Right,” the General boomed. “Just testing to see if you was paying attention. We stash our own car at North Park and pick up an extra set of plates.”
“Why do we need all them license plates?” Bobby asked.
“I’ll get to that. Stop interrupting when I’m giving you your orders, soldier.”
Bobby gave him a salute that twisted down with his thumb against his nose.
“I got this planned down to the last detail,” the General continued, ignoring Bobby’s latest mutiny. “Includin’ the smartest getaway anybody ever did. It’ll be a classic.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bobby said. “Only if it don’t work this time I’m going in for something easy, like stealing plans for the latest nuke warhead out of a Pentagon wastebasket, or from the files of one of them newspapers.”
The General snorted and made Bobby repeat every move he was supposed to make inside the bank until he could recite it without taking a breath.
“That brings us to the getaway,” the General said, beaming with pride. “There’s a filling station four blocks away. I checked, and they start pumping gas the same time we’re going to hit the bank. What we do is pull into the first alley, which is back of two stores, with no windows for people to snoop. There we’ll switch license plates again. That way if somebody happens to take down the numbers of the first set at the bank — and I hope they do — the cops’ll be looking for some other car. Meanwhile we go on up and get in line for gasoline just like we been there all morning, see? In a couple of minutes, half a dozen cars will pull in behind us, bumper-to-bumper like, and the cops won’t give us a second look. By the time we get up to the pumps, those police cars will be clear to Waxahachie.”