It took me some time to go to sleep. The guys in the next cabin were hotter than a firecracker, it seemed to me, and yet they had established alibis all over the lake. They couldn’t have robbed the Blakely bank. When you are on the lake fishing, you aren’t robbing banks, and that definitely was where these four were.
Oh well, maybe I was getting old — brain softening up or something. Everything in me was screaming that I was sitting right on top of a bank robbery that I ought to blow wide open — and yet nothing in the whole business fit together. The four had been on the lake, same as I. They had been seen all over the lake, and their car hadn’t left the fishing camp all day. So I turned off my feeble mind and went to sleep.
The sun was already up when I hit the lake next morning. I had overslept an hour, and the old Navy wound in the left hip was paining me, and that was a sign that a spell of weather was on its way. The eastern sky was red too. “Red at morn, sailor’s warn— Red at night, sailor’s delight.” The bass had read the signs too, long before I had. They were still sulk-king, as they had been at sunset. Oh well, if the white caps started rising on the lake I would pull off and go to the cabin and get some sleep, or I’d go over to Blakely City and nose around the police station and see if they had any sign — any line on the bank robbers.
I used the paddle to edge silently into the cove, and then threw everything I had in the tackle box at the bass, but they wouldn’t hit. Then, throttle at a crawl, I started pulling out of the cove, changing to an eel and jig combination as I did so, intending to fish the deep water off the points. Something hit me right between the eyes — figuratively.
I yanked the boat around and sent it back towards the center of the cove. Yes, I hadn’t been seeing things. One hundred feet out from the shore line was a floating wooden marker — a fresh pine slab, about three feet long, with a bright copper wire attached and leading down into the depths!
Such a marker is frequently used by fishermen or lake-men for various reasons — to mark a good fishing spot, or to serve as a direction guide, or as a depth marker. Yesterday morning this marker hadn’t been there. It could have been there yesterday evening, because it was late when I passed that way, and I could have gone within a few feet of it without seeing it.
I edged the boat towards the marker and caught hold of the copper wire and began heaving on it. Something tremendously heavy was attached to it on the bottom. I put my back into the work, and the thing began to move. I began bringing it up slowly, while the boat careened over almost to the gunwale.
Hand over hand I brought up the length of bright copper wire, some 25 feet of it. Then, several feet down, I saw it — shining metal. It was a large fishing ice-box, with the lid pad-locked and attached to the ice box by wire was a rubberized bag!
Puffing arid grunting I got the whole into the boat, wire and all, and sat there panting like a porpoise. The whine of a speeding outboard came to me, from the center of the lake. I turned to see a boat headed directly towards me and cutting a great swath through the surface. It was time to get moving.
By the time I had the motor started and underway, the other boat was within two hundred yards. I headed up the shore line, throttle open, picking up speed and going hell for leather. The other boat came right after me, wide open, spray flying wide. Three of my cabin neighbors were in that boat, and they were after me and no question about it. By the time I was full speed, the other boat had cut the distance to 100 yards.
We went up the north shore line, with my 25 horse outboard now holding its own. White and Caprino were waving their hands and yelling. The roar of the motors made it impossible to hear what they said, but I knew damn well what they meant. If they caught me I’d wind up at the bottom of the lake, wire and icebox attached but no buoy to mark the spot where the body lay.
Something that wasn’t a bumble bee hit the top of the ice box and ricocheted in a screaming whine out over the lake. They were using that .22 rifle! I bent my 250 pound anatomy down as far as I could behind the motor and kept pouring on the coal, running towards a small island ahead. Passing the island, I made a 90 degree turn sharply to port, then reversed my course completely, ducking around the island and headed back towards the center of the lake.
The maneuver, which caught White and company by surprise, gained a little distance, but not too much. The wind was freshening, and out in the middle of the lake tiny white-caps were showing. I aimed at a rocky point on the opposite shore, a mile and a half away, watching the surface ahead closely, and thanking the good Lord that I had filled the gasoline tank before starting out that morning.
A minute passed, and I sighted what I was looking for, another marker, a block of wood bobbing on the surface and attached to a wire. I made a turn to starboard around this marker, doubling as if I intended to reverse my. course again.
The pursuing boat turned instantly and cut across the arc of my course, thus gaining a full 50 yards on me. Two bullets whistled by my ear. Caprino was coming close!
And then it happened — what I had been praying for! The boat that was chasing me smashed into a low water rock bar with a resounding crash, and the three occupants went flying through the air. They came up one by one, sputtering and cursing, Caprino, Hamm, then White — to find themselves up to their waists in water, a good half mile from shore. Their boat with shattered bow had capsized, and the .22 rifle had been lost in the smash-up.
I cut my motor and circled back, to idle about 50 yards from the bedraggled trio. “Now, you’re marooned on a low-water bar, and I’d advise you to stay right where you are and not try moving around unless you’re darn good Channel swimmers. The water is 50 feet deep in every direction from where you are, and the white caps are rising. Stay right there and be good boys and maybe you can keep your noses above water.”
“But I can’t even swim!” bawled White. He looked really terrified.
“Now ain’t that just too bad!”
At the dock I got Jim Taylor to help lift the heavy ice box and the rubberized bag out of the boat and told him to keep watch over it.
At the lodge I put in a call to the Blakely City police department. “Yep, all of it!” I said. “They used boats instead of a get-away car, and they put the money in a rubberized sack inside a fishing ice-box. They put their tommy guns and their other heavy artillery in another rubber sack, attached everything to a floating surface marker by wire, and sank the whole business into the lake — to stay there until things cooled off. They probably dumped their masks and the clothes they used in the hold-up into the water too, weighted down with rocks — and had their fishing clothes on under what they took off.
“Yeah, Captain, they’re stranded out on a reef helpless as flies on fly-paper — three of them. Yeah, I’ll have the fourth one hog-tied and ready for special delivery when you get here. Take all the time you want.”
Sam Willoughby was goggle eyed. “The big guy is down at the cabin. I saw him just a few minutes ago.” Sam took a shotgun from under the counter and handed me a .45 automatic.
“Put those guns down,” I said. “Guns get people killed. You stay out of this Sam. Not a gun on the place in that cabin. You said so yourself. I think I’m still man enough to take him.”
“But you’re not as young as he is, and he’s as big as you are, Joe!”
“This will separate the men from the boys, Sam.”
I limped down to the cabin, trying to fit all the pieces together on the way. I’m not too fast with the think tank. Anything obvious takes me about 30 minutes to comprehend when my brain is working real good. But it came to me on the way. The cook, Lenny Hamm, who didn’t go out with the three of them the first time on the lake the day of the robbery, already was in Blakely City. It was he who stole the get-away car and he parked it in the woods over the ridge from the lake. Then, at the appointed time, he had met them on the lake shore, and they had taken him back to a point near their cabin. He had left the boat then, gone to the cabin, while the three others returned to the dock and rented another boat and motor. They waited at the dock, and Hamm came down to them after apparently just having finished his cabin chores.