It was a little after ten o’clock when Mr. Gibbon drove down Holly Boulevard and turned on to Main Street. Apparently many other people had heard about the holiday and had decided to do their weekend shopping. The traffic was heavy; Mr. Gibbon leaned on his horn and swore.
They had all digested the plan and were impatient to get down to brass tacks. But now the car was stuck at a red light. Mr. Gibbon shut off the engine when he saw no signs of movement in the congestion.
“Tarnation,” Mr. Gibbon said. “We’ll be here all day in this traffic. Now you can see perfectly well what a godawful headache it must be to run a country. No wonder the president has to have his gall removed. Why, if he didn’t he’d be up tightern’a duck’s ass from morning to night. Here we are doing our damnedest to help out the country and we’re hamstrung from top to bottom with this traffic.” He smacked his lips and looked around. “This traffic’s thicker’n gumbo.”
There was a dark family in the next car. They smiled at Mr. Gibbon. Mr. Gibbon grinned back pleasantly and showed all fifteen of his teeth. He turned to Mrs. Gneiss, who was sitting in the middle. “Don’t look now, but there are some You-Know-Whos next door. Hear their radio?” He sighed. “Those spooks sure need their bongo music.”
The traffic started again. As soon as the cars began moving Mr. Gibbon shouted, “Did you see the nerve of those bastards? Grinning at me like damn fools. Felt like spitting in their eyes!”
Rage had taken possession of Mr. Gibbon by the time they approached the Mount Holly Trust Company. He was panting, and wetting his lips. He discovered that he could barely speak. He had made it a cardinal rule that everyone should be cool as cucumbers, but Miss Ball (smiling out the window, hoping to catch the eye of one of her hooky-playing kindergarteners who, skipping by, would see their own teacher in her adorable little cop suit) and Mrs. Gneiss (munching dolefully on a Nougat Delite) were the only cool ones in the car.
Mr. Gibbon looked over and said in a tone of voice that neither Miss Ball nor Mrs. Gneiss recognized as Charlie’s, “Get that fool hat off! You wanna wreck everything?”
Miss Ball took her hat off and smiled. Mr. Gibbon at that moment developed a facial tic that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
He drove by the bank and then up a side street to the back. Here he pointed the car in the direction of the front of the bank, a little hill, and said, “This is it, boys. You know what to do.” He wrenched his hat down over his ears, and got out of the car and told Mrs. Gneiss to hurry up. Then he felt in his shopping bag for his pistol and started down the little hill which led to the front door of the Mount Holly Trust Company.
Mrs. Gneiss put her Nougat Delite into her purse with her pistol, snapped the purse shut and waddled after Mr. Gibbon.
They entered the bank and went immediately to a side table. Mr. Gibbon put his head down and muttered, “You know what to do.”
Mrs. Gneiss ambled to the entrance and stood next to the guard. He wore a brand new uniform and looked rather young. Harold Potts’s replacement, thought Mrs. Gneiss. He smiled at Mrs. Gneiss. She smiled back and clutched her purse.
Out back, Miss Ball checked her watch. She stared at it for a full minute, and then took the antenna, the searchlight and the two buckets of water from the back seat. These she put some distance from the car in a little pile together with her policeman’s hat. She walked about twenty-five feet away from the pile, which was now be-tween her and the car. She checked her watch again and smiled. Keep cool, she thought.
Mr. Gibbon walked toward the teller’s cage.
“White folks move aside,” he said.
There were some protests. “Aw, let the old coot have his own way,” someone grumbled.
Mr. Gibbon looked hard at the teller and said, “Okay, hand over the money.”
The man behind the counter cocked his head and then smiled, “Have you filled out a withdrawal slip, sir?”
Mr. Gibbon put his face up against the bars of the teller’s cage so that his nose and chin stuck through. “Hand over the money, all of it, you hear? This is a stickup.”
“Beg pardon?”
“A stickup,” said Mr. Gibbon. “You’re being stuckup. By me. Understand?”
“Perhaps you’d like to have a word with the manager,” the teller said.
Miss Ball checked her watch again. It was almost time. She edged over to the pile of equipment, the hat, the light, the bucket. A man appeared next to her. “Got a fare?” he asked. Miss Ball smiled, but did not answer. The man got into the back of the car and opened his newspaper.
Mrs. Gneiss sneaked a look at Harold Potts’s replacement and felt in her purse. As soon as she did so Harold Potts’s replacement looked inside, almost involuntarily. Mrs. Gneiss quickly took out her Nougat Delite and, grinning, offered him some. “Much obliged,” he said, “but no thanks.”
“This is the last time I’m gonna tell you. This is a stickup, now hand over the cash!”
The people who had been in line in back of Mr. Gibbon started backing away. They looked at him with the kind of nervous puzzlement that arrives as a smirk. The smirks vanished when Mr. Gibbon pulled Old Trusty from his shopping bag and flashed it around. Some people started for the door, but Mrs. Gneiss stepped away from the guard and took aim with her Nougat Delite. “Don’t move,” she said.
She heard laughter, and then she heard very plainly, “Just a couple of old cranks. Might as well humor them — they don’t mean any harm. Just two old farts.”
Mrs. Gneiss dropped her Nougat Delite into her purse and yanked out the policeman’s.38 caliber Colt, looked for the source of the voice, and dropped him in his tracks with one shot.
She waved Harold Potts’s replacement away from the door and gestured for the people to back up against the wall.
Oddly, the moment Mrs. Gneiss fired her gun everyone in the bank raised their arms over their head; even the girls sitting at typewriters many feet away did so. All talking ceased. Just like on television, thought Mrs. Gneiss.
Mr. Gibbon pushed his shopping bag over the counter to the teller. The teller stuffed it with big bundles of money wrapped with paper bands and gave the bulging sack back to him.
At this moment a little brown man shuffled around front and, with his hands high above his head, said, “Don’t anyone panic. Just do what the man says. We’re insured against theft.”
Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of the rock-hard heroism that is smack in the belly of every good bank manager, the little brown man smiled and nodded obligingly to Mr. Gibbon.
Mr. Gibbon sucked in air and snarled, “I don’t want any of your cheap lip!” And he shot the little brown man dead. Like a toy the man gurgled, flapped his dry little hands and went down.
The people in the bank straightened their arms and held them higher.
It was time. Miss Ball picked up a bucket of water and splashed it against the left front door of the car. mount holly police complete with telephone number and badge appeared from under the running whitewash. She did the same with the right front, and on this trip around the car popped the antenna and the searchlight in place. Then she snatched the hat and put it on, pushed up the knot of her tie, got into the car, released the brake, flicked on the siren and started rolling down the little hill to the front of the bank.
The man in the backseat did not look up. He said, “Oak Street,” and kept on with his paper.
Mr. Gibbon was standing next to a huge pile of bills when Miss Ball pushed through the door and said with stage gruffness, “Okay, don’t anyone move. Drop your guns and get your hands up.”
With a clang the guns hit the marble floor of the Mount Holly Trust Company.